You’re Not Broken. You’re Becoming.

One of the best things you can do for the health of your plant is to stress it out. In order to be healthy, the plant must suffer at times.

Suffering grows humans too.

I’m not on TikTok or Instagram, but if those platforms are anything like they were when I left - there are still plenty of people hawking the Secret to Wholeness™.

There is no secret. But there is a trick. I’ll get to that.

There is no such thing as wholeness. Wholeness is a product sold by the health and wellness industry meant to make you feel you are broken and that the $79 pack of adaptogenic whatevers is JUST the thing to cure you of your malaise. Your ills. Your fatal flaws. 

There is growth, or there is death. And growth is stressful. And growth is ultimately fatal - all things must pass. 

Gardeners know the secret to a healthy bloom in springtime is to stress the fuck out of the plant coming out of dormancy. A plant’s natural lifecycle is one of dormancy, stress, growth, bloom, and decay. Each phase as necessary as the last.

As a psychotherapist I have seen many people who just want the quick fix answer to all that ails them (uh, me too). As a psychoanalytic scholar, and veritable expert on all strain of existential crisis I’m here to tell you that the best of us suffer intensely. 

The trick is - recognizing when you cannot hold it all on your own, and asking for help before suffering becomes your identity. 

The goal of therapy is not to disappear the pain, but rather, to so well-callous the hand that holds the pain, that suddenly the red-hot thing (traumatic memory, root pain, primal fear) is able to be held - and understood.

It’s only by going over and over and over again the painful bits… building up tolerance and consciousness… experiencing stressful growth bit by bit - that we earn the ability to move more consciously in our lives. To not be governed by the inner destructive forces that would keep us suffering in the dark.

That we finally earn our peace.

Gender Isn’t a Problem to Solve

The political arena in America has more in common with the failed spectacle of the Arena Football League than with the serious business of running government. So trust me when I say - I’m not here to contend with your belief system around who should and should not be in power. That’s for a political science geek, I’m a psychology geek.

But I am writing about power. 

Power thrives in the otherwise sick soil of grandiosity and narcissism.

Narcissism feeds on rigidity. It leaves no room for nuance, for contradiction, for anyone else's experience. That’s how we arrive at the grotesque notion that Transwomen are just men in dresses, or that Transmen are failed dykes… or whatever the hate-speech catch of the day is.

Narcissists have no room for anything other than their own impressions, senses of themselves - they are rigid, and they are terrified, and they certainly make interesting patients.

Let’s touch some grass, and sink into our human roots for a moment:

Banana Slugs: No hierarchy, no gods, no masters

Banana slugs are hermaphroditic. Each slug possesses both male and female reproductive organs. When two slugs mate, both can fertilize and be fertilized, often simultaneously.

Willow Trees: Gender is seasonal

Some willow species can switch between producing male and female flowers from year to year. They're known as labile in sex expression - meaning gendered traits aren’t fixed, even within the same organism. For willow trees gender is not a core identity, but a fluid role.

Ancient Human Cultures: Gender non-conforming gods

The goddess Inanna was worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia with priests who were assigned male at birth but lived as women - early examples of institutionalized gender fluidity within religious systems. Divinity made space for complexity. Gender was mystical, not medical.

How can you argue with nature? Human nature? The nature of the gods? 

You could try to of course. Millions do. An army of narcissists shaking their terrified fists from their porches saying, “There’s only two genders!”, isn’t just pathetic, it’s inaccurate. 

There are not only two genders. 

There is only one reality - and that reality contains multitudes.