On Not Fixing Yourself

What if the thing you've been calling a problem is actually a doorway. One you keep walking past because you're too busy trying to repair it?

I spent a lot of years trying to fix myself. Maybe you know that particular rabbit hole.

You notice something about yourself you don't like. A pattern. A reaction. A relationship that keeps poking the same tender place. An emotion that feels too big. A habit you swore you were done with. And immediately the question becomes: How do I fix this?

So you read the book. Listen to the podcast. Take the class. Do the healing. Journal about it. Meditate on it. Breathe through it. Talk to your therapist, your coach, your best friend, your guides, your higher self... And listen, I love all of those things. I've done every one of them multiple times. 🤭

But somewhere along the way, healing can quietly become another way of telling ourselves that who we are right now isn't quite acceptable. That there is some future, healed version of us we're supposed to finally become.

I don't believe that anymore.

What if you aren't a problem to solve?

What if the thing you've been trying so hard to get rid of isn't asking to be fixed? What if it's asking to be heard?

That's a very different conversation.

Instead of How do I stop feeling this? maybe we ask, What is this feeling showing me?

Instead of Why do I keep doing this? maybe it's, What has this part of me been trying to protect?

Instead of When am I finally going to heal this? maybe we allow ourselves to wonder, What if nothing has gone wrong here?

That doesn't mean we don't change. It doesn't mean we stay in patterns that hurt us or ignore the places where we're being invited to grow. It means we stop making ourselves wrong long enough to become curious about what's actually happening.

Because sometimes the thing we keep calling a problem is a doorway.

And doorways aren't meant to be repaired. They're meant to be walked through.

Healing or remembering?

This is why the word remembrance has become so important to me. There is a subtle difference between believing you need to become someone and remembering who you already are.

One says, I'm not there yet.

The other whispers, Oh. There I am.

That's the work I'm interested in now. Not endlessly excavating ourselves looking for the next broken thing. Not turning healing into another full-time job. Not measuring our spiritual growth by how calm, positive, productive, regulated, enlightened, or "high vibe" we can manage to be.

But becoming intimate with ourselves. The beautiful parts. The inconvenient parts. The parts that are certain and the parts that have absolutely no fucking idea what they're doing.

All of it.

Because you are a human BEing having a human experience. And maybe the invitation isn't to transcend your humanness. Maybe it's to inhabit it more fully.

You get to bring all of yourself

I've started thinking about healing less as fixing and more as listening. Listening to the body. Listening to the emotions. Listening to the places that tighten. Listening to the places that light up. Listening to what keeps whispering underneath all the noise.

Sometimes what we hear asks us to change something. Sometimes it asks us to grieve something. Sometimes it asks us to rest. Sometimes it says, For the love of God, go have some fun.

And sometimes it simply wants us to sit beside ourselves and say:

I'm here. I'm listening. You don't have to disappear for me to love you.

That's remembrance. Not becoming someone worthy of your own love. Remembering you always were.

So the next time you catch yourself trying to fix something about yourself, maybe don't rush quite so quickly. Get curious. There might be a doorway there, and something on the other side of it has been waiting for you to remember.

What if there is nothing wrong with you in this moment? What becomes possible from there?

Huge hugs & divine love,
Morgan