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.