How can I possibly heal myself out of my soul?

This is my love letter to you, sweetheart – the you that works so hard on herself/himself. The you that must fix everything – in relationship and in yourself.

I understand how hard you work on things, how hard you work on yourself. Not the standard self-improvement stuff but the going above and beyond stuff. The ’I’ll carry all the weight of this’, stuff.

You take it upon yourself, all the responsibility of your relationships. Not only do you do your work, but you do what is supposed to be other people’s work too. You’re working all that much harder for everyone and only you know that fact.

This is when self-improvement becomes self-annihilation – when we try to get rid of who we are because we feel like there is something wrong with us. For as long as we feel this way we are blinded by it, it gets us to ignore what’s really going on in our relationships because we’re so focused on being better. 

We ignore the red flags, we stay in relationships that have long surpassed their expiry date, and we negate the obvious inconsistencies and incompatibility. 

What we’re really doing is avoiding something deeper – something that existed long before the relationship ever did, something so painful that it would feel better to stay with people who can’t really meet us – people who are so vastly different from who we are because it keeps us in a loop of chasing instead of choosing.

If you played a different game, if you stopped running or chasing an outcome, you would also have to let go of control – allow the chips to fall where they may, allow other people to do their own work and allow yourself space enough to feel.

The work happens; the self-improvement catches up to us when we finally allow ourselves to stand still so that it can. It happens when we allow ourselves to stop and feel those very uncomfortable things that we are terrified of. 

This is how we cultivate courage and build safety in ourselves. This is the process of coming home to who we are – not from a place of judgement, but from a place of allowing. 

I wish you the courage to stay with yourself, to not run away from the uncomfortable feelings that are asking so loudly to be felt by you.

In love and gratitude,