Another Assignment on Earth

This wouldn’t be my first rodeo on Earth.

In fact, I am a seasoned traveler of this planet.

It is one of the least interesting, most disgusting, and deeply disconnected planets a soul can choose to run around in wearing a meat suit.

I know I sound arrogant right now, but some of us have better things to do in the cosmos than start over from human scratch—as a baby, wiggling our way into adulthood, only to be programmed by a parasitic society and later forced to deprogram ourselves just to remember why we came.

What a colossal waste of time, honestly.

I must have had a very specific mission, because otherwise there is no way I would have bothered coming back at all.

I remember arriving—preparing for the worst possible scenario.

I could hear my human mother screaming in pain.

The room was filled with other humans—most of them male, most of them completely useless—encouraging her to “keep going,” “breathe,” and “you’re doing great.”

If I could have spoken upon arrival, I would have told them all to shut the fuck up.

Nothing they were doing was helping her.

If you don’t understand what someone is actually going through, it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

There was one nurse—a woman—who was genuinely providing my mother with empathetic care.

For her, I am grateful.

A relaxed human body makes for a much less turbulent exit.

And then—I popped out.

Another ride on the Earth train.

I was already disappointed.

I opened my eyes and let out my first cry into what would likely be my home for the next hundred years or so.

Everything was chaos.

Ugly humans. Harsh lights. Disarray everywhere.

Of course, it was blurry.

Humans have to grow into their senses.

People think babies are stupid.

We’re not.

We’re just intelligent in a way adults no longer recognize.

When we are born, we are closer to our true selves.

Our authenticity hasn’t been drop-kicked out of us yet.

As babies, we are tuned into the frequency of love and truth in a way most adults never return to.

Adults, on the other hand, spend their lives being infected by fear, shame, and mediocrity— told who to be, how to perform, and what makes them acceptable.

As a baby?

I didn’t give a fuck about any of that.

My mother was crying tears of joy.

The male human looked stressed—but relieved the screaming was over.

Doctors flailed around doing things that seemed important.

Bright lights.

Harsh noises.

The sharp smell of hand sanitizer burning the air.

But this—

the forgetting,

the numbing,

the slow erosion of truth—

And all I could think was—

This is not what I signed up for.

Well… I mean, I did sign up for it.

But my immediate question was:

Did I sign the contract in pencil?

Maybe erasable ink?

Was there any way to get out of this go-around?

Thinking it had only been less than one hour, and I’d probably be living at least 80 years in this shithole, was enough to make me seriously reconsider my choices.

Could someone please put me back into my mom?

I was not ready for another go-around on this joke of a planet.

And yet— despite my immediate regret, despite the fluorescent horror show and the shrieking humans and the sterile smell of control—

I stayed.

Because the thing about souls like mine is that we don’t come here for comfort.

We come for friction.

Earth is not a vacation planet.

It’s a compression chamber.

A place where truth gets buried under noise, where sensitivity is mislabeled as weakness, and where remembering who you are feels like rebellion.

This planet doesn’t reward authenticity.

It rewards obedience dressed up as success.

It rewards people who numb themselves just enough to function, who trade wonder for productivity, who confuse survival with living.

I learned early that this world prefers its souls quiet.

Smaller.

Grateful for crumbs.

And I learned just as early that I would never be able to comply.

Something in me refused to forget completely.

Even as layers were added— language, expectation, shame, fear—there was always a low hum beneath it all.

A frequency I couldn’t unhear.

I watched humans spend their entire lives running from themselves, building cages and calling them homes, calling exhaustion “normal,” calling disconnection “maturity.”

I watched love get turned into leverage.

Pain turned into currency.

Control turned into safety.

And every time someone told me, “This is just how it is,” something ancient in me whispered,

No. It isn’t.

That whisper is why I didn’t blend in.

Why I didn’t settle comfortably into the programming.

Why addiction, collapse, grief, and unraveling became part of my curriculum instead.

Because some souls don’t wake up gently.

Some of us have to be cracked open just to remember the assignment.

I didn’t come here to be liked.

I didn’t come here to behave.

I didn’t come here to play small and call it peace.

I came here to interrupt the pattern.

To remember out loud.

To refuse the lie.

To hold the frequency even when it costs me everything.

So yes—

I was disappointed when I arrived.

But I stayed.

And if I’m still here, it’s because the mission isn’t finished yet.

And the thing no one tells you about remembering is that it doesn’t feel holy at first.

It feels lonely.

It feels like seeing the wiring behind the walls while everyone else is still admiring the wallpaper.

It feels like being called “difficult” for refusing to swallow what never sat right in your body.

This planet punishes those who see too clearly.

Not with fire or exile— but with gaslighting, erasure, and the slow insistence that you are the problem.

So I learned to fracture myself just enough to survive.

I learned to dim.

I learned to numb.

I learned to forget on command.

Until forgetting started killing me.

That’s the part people don’t like to hear— that the real danger wasn’t seeing too much, it was pretending I didn’t.

Addiction wasn’t the flaw.

Collapse wasn’t the failure.

They were the emergency exits.

The body pulling the plug when the soul could no longer tolerate the lie.

So no—

I didn’t come here to save the world.

I came here to stay awake inside it.

To remember in a place designed for forgetting.

To speak in a culture that rewards silence.

To refuse the role I was handed and write my own lines instead.

And if that makes me strange, or difficult, or ungrateful—

so be it.

I didn’t come here to belong.

I came here to remember.

By Ellen Tjaden