The most effective form of control isn’t oppression — it’s erasing your memory of the part of you that could have burned the whole structure down. In practice this means your childhood instincts, your early boldness, your imagination, your raw desire, your honesty, your wild emotional clarity, and your natural sovereignty are slowly replaced by expectations, shame, approval-seeking, roles, and “adult maturity” that kill the original blueprint of who you could have become. Once you forget that inner fire ever existed, you stop searching for it — you stop rebelling, you stop dreaming, you stop acting, and you stop demanding a life that fits your nature, because you genuinely believe the smallness you live in is “just who you are.” Men lose the fire by being ridiculed or ignored when they show power; women lose it by being punished or shamed when they show intensity — but the result is identical: a human being who cannot remember what it felt like to be fully alive. The blade cuts deepest when you realize the system didn’t need to cage you — it only needed to make you forget that you were born with the ability to walk out.