With age comes wisdom—or so we’re told. It’s the gift handed to us, not in exchange for time alone, but in exchange for every heartbreak, every loss, every piercing blow life deals us when we’re too tender to defend ourselves.
Wisdom isn’t inherited.
It isn’t handed down like heirlooms or passed along with stories over kitchen tables. It is earned. And it is earned through pain. We earn wisdom when those we trust disappoint us in unimaginable ways. We earn it through grief, through mourning those we love deeply. When the physical deaths of our parents take us back to our childhood selves, we’re momentarily that little kid again—the one who lost sight of their parent in a grocery store aisle, and in that terrifying moment, felt the enormous gulf of space, the giant castle of the store around them. To our parents, the grocery store was nothing but a closet, a few short steps from end to end. They knew where we were. But we didn’t know that. And that fear we felt as children echoes the deeper fears we feel when life separates us from those we thought would always be there.
That moment when we lose a parent becomes not just the loss of a person but the loss of the child we once were—the child who could be comforted by the simple reassurance of knowing someone always knew where we were. As we age, these lessons stack up. They build a weight within us, a collection of moments that shape and reshape the person we are trying to become.
But wisdom is not born just from experience itself.
Experience alone doesn’t make us wise—it’s our willingness to confront what has happened to us, to stare it down and call it by name, to say yes, this happened, and it left me changed. Only then does pain have the power to teach. Only when we are willing to say, this hurt me, does it become more than an open wound. It becomes a scar. And scars hold stories, lessons written into our skin and souls that shape how we move forward.
We must be willing to accept that we were hurt in the first place, and that the world didn’t always protect us. But more often than not, we’re also our own abusers. I’m not speaking of physical abuse or violations of our dignity by others—that is never the victim’s fault. But in the quiet ways, we hurt ourselves.
We allow so much wrongdoing to happen because we didn’t establish boundaries, or didn’t enforce them even when we knew we should. We didn’t recognize our worth, so we sought validation from others, handing over the keys to our inner selves with the naïveté that our openness would be cherished, respected, or even held in gratitude. We let people see too deeply into us, not realizing that our vulnerability was precious, not a weapon to be freely given.
We didn’t understand the need for balance between ego and soul within us—the true depth of understanding “head versus heart.” Or, so many other virtues versus so many other virtues that we were taught the labels for but not the true reality of—pride versus humility, control versus surrender, recognition versus solitude—because only life could teach us those things with substance, and sometimes even when things happen to us at a young age it takes many more years and other experiences for the reality to click.
It’s the constant tension between our need to be seen and validated and our longing to be authentically ourselves, the struggle between the part of us that seeks to build walls of defense and the part that craves openness and connection. Ego demands certainty and the illusion of invincibility, while the soul yearns for acceptance and the courage to be vulnerable.
When people turned our vulnerabilities into their weapons—wielding them with the precision of someone familiar with the architecture of our soul—they left behind ruins. Wars were waged not with swords or guns but with words and betrayals, neglect and indifference. They bombed the castles of trust we built within ourselves, collapsed the bridges that connected our worth to our sense of self.
We, in our pain, convinced ourselves that perhaps this was our own doing—that we were somehow to blame for our shattered foundations. But we are not. What if our lack of boundaries wasn’t our “fault” so much as a consequence of simply not having learned? Was our need for validation a crime? I don’t think so. These were lessons we hadn’t yet learned, wounds we hadn’t yet bandaged.
With each heartbreak, each loss, we come face to face with our own choices, our own misguided beliefs that left us vulnerable to harm. The truth of wisdom isn’t that it makes us invincible to pain—it’s that it teaches us to recognize our patterns and choose differently the next time. Wisdom tells us that the story isn’t over just because we made mistakes, or handed our trust to those unworthy of it.
And it’s never too late to rewrite the ending.
To earn wisdom is to be willing to admit our part in our pain, not to dwell in guilt but to reclaim our agency. We learn to forgive ourselves for not knowing what we know now. We accept that boundaries are not walls to keep others out, but foundations to keep our sense of self steady. And we learn to hold our vulnerability as a precious gift—not to be given recklessly, but to be shared with those who prove themselves worthy of holding it with care.
Growing older isn’t just about surviving the storms of life—it’s about learning to rebuild after them. It’s about standing among the wreckage of our old selves, the old dreams and the old versions of us that died along the way, and deciding to rebuild with purpose. To become not just a survivor of pain, but a student of it. To see each scar as proof that we’re still here, still capable of growth, and still capable of becoming whole.
The journey of wisdom is a painful one. It is full of heartbreak and heartache, loss and confusion, grief and letting go. But it’s also a journey of acceptance, healing, and self-forgiveness. It’s about letting the pain make us better, not bitter. It’s about recognizing that every time we were knocked down, we had a choice—to stay down, or to get back up and rebuild. And every time we chose to get back up, we chose growth over resentment, wisdom over defeat.
Wisdom, in the end, isn’t given freely with age.
It’s earned through every heartbreak, every moment we confronted our past selves and our choices. It’s earned through every time we lost our parents in the store of life and had to remind ourselves that even when the world felt big and unfamiliar, we were never truly lost.
Wisdom is what we find when we allow the pain to teach us, to shape us, and ultimately, to make us whole.
The Twin Tree Project 