There’s a peculiar kind of anxiety that arrives after an election.

You’ve done what you can do.

You’ve researched the candidates, examined the ballot measures, considered the issues, and cast your vote.

And then you wait.

For some people, that waiting is mildly irritating.

For others, particularly those whose lives may be significantly affected by the polici…

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There’s a particular kind of guilt that can show up when someone does something nice for us.

Not the ordinary desire to return a kindness. Not the warm feeling of wanting to help someone who has helped us.

Something heavier.

The feeling that we now owe them.

Maybe they gave us a gift. Maybe they helped us through a difficult situation. Maybe they offered us…

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One of the most comforting beliefs we can hold about ourselves is that we’re difficult to fool. We recognize obvious scams, question suspicious headlines, and pride ourselves on seeing through political manipulation. We know that misinformation exists, and we assume that awareness gives us a certain amount of protection.

Unfortunately, recognizing the existence of misinformation is not the same thing as recognizing it when it aligns with our existing beliefs.

The most persuasive misleading information often doesn’t arrive as an obviously fabricated story. It arrives wrapped in familiar language, supported by selected facts, and delivered by someone whose values resemble our own. It offers an explanation that feels consistent with what we already understand about the world.

Sometimes it even contains enough truth to make the misleading conclusion difficult to identify.

This is why media literacy requires more than memorizing a list of trustworthy websites or learning how to recognize an AI-generated photograph. It asks us to examine the relationship between evidence, identity, emotion, and the stories we find satisfying.

And that examination becomes considerably more uncomfortable when the subject is something we care about deeply.

The Appeal of Being Right

Political beliefs rarely exist in isolation. They develop through personal experiences, family relationships, community membership, education, and the values we consider important.

When an issue concerns our safety, livelihood, rights, or sense of belonging, the information surrounding it can feel deeply personal. A political claim may appear to confirm something we’ve experienced firsthand or reinforce concerns we’ve held for years.

That emotional connection doesn’t make the claim inaccurate. Personal experience can be a legitimate reason to investigate a subject.

However, familiarity can influence how much scrutiny we apply to information.

Confirmation bias describes our tendency to favor information consistent with existing beliefs. This can affect which stories attract our attention, which sources seem credible, and how we interpret ambiguous evidence.

The challenge is not simply that people believe false claims. It is that a claim can feel credible before we’ve established whether it is supported.

A damaging allegation about a politician we distrust may seem entirely plausible. A similarly damaging allegation about someone we admire may immediately inspire questions about the source, context, and evidence.

The difference may have less to do with the quality of the information than with our relationship to the person being discussed.

Consistent standards are difficult precisely because they sometimes require us to investigate claims we’d prefer to accept.

When Information Becomes Identity

Disagreements about political information can become particularly intense when beliefs are closely connected to personal or group identity.

A factual correction may be experienced as more than a challenge to a specific claim. It can feel like criticism of a community, an important value, or a person’s ability to exercise good judgment.

This helps explain why simply presenting accurate information does not always resolve a disagreement.

People may question the credibility of the source, reinterpret the evidence, or redirect the conversation toward a different claim. In some circumstances, these responses reflect legitimate concerns. Sources can make mistakes, evidence can be incomplete, and interpretations can reasonably differ.

The difficulty arises when no conceivable evidence would be sufficient to change the conclusion.

At that point, the belief may no longer be functioning primarily as a claim that can be investigated. It may be serving another purpose, such as maintaining belonging, reinforcing identity, or protecting an existing understanding of the world.

Recognizing this possibility in ourselves is uncomfortable.

It requires considering whether our commitment is to a particular conclusion or to the process of discovering what the available evidence supports.

The distinction matters because genuine inquiry must leave room for the possibility that our first interpretation was incomplete.

The Emotional Economy of Political Information

Political communication has always involved emotion. Speeches, campaign materials, protests, and public debates frequently appeal to hope, fear, anger, pride, and solidarity.

Emotion itself is not evidence of manipulation.

People can have legitimate emotional responses to policies that affect their lives. Anger may arise from documented injustice. Fear may reflect a real threat. Hope may be grounded in meaningful possibilities.

The problem begins when emotional intensity substitutes for evidence.

A post that creates urgency without providing a verifiable source encourages reaction before investigation. A message suggesting that only disloyal or uncaring people would question its claims turns ordinary scrutiny into a test of group membership.

Social media can make these dynamics especially visible.

Engagement-driven environments reward material that attracts attention, and emotionally charged content may encourage people to comment, argue, or share. The precise effects depend on the platform, its recommendation systems, and user behavior, but the result can be an information environment in which visibility is mistaken for credibility.

Repeated exposure can also create a sense of familiarity. A claim encountered across multiple accounts may begin to feel widely established, even when those accounts are repeating the same unsupported allegation.

The number of people sharing information does not determine whether it is true.

Nor does the confidence with which they present it.

The Problem With Convenient Evidence

One of the more subtle forms of misleading political communication involves presenting accurate facts in ways that encourage unsupported conclusions.

A campaign advertisement may cite a genuine legislative vote while omitting the contents of the bill. A statistic may accurately describe a percentage increase while concealing the small number of events involved. A quotation may reproduce someone’s exact words while removing the surrounding explanation.

These examples demonstrate why fact-checking cannot always be reduced to deciding whether an individual sentence is technically true.

Evidence must also be relevant to the conclusion being drawn from it.

Consider a hypothetical advertisement claiming that an elected official opposed funding for a public service. The advertisement cites a real vote against a spending bill.

The vote may be accurately reported. Yet understanding the official’s position requires examining what the bill contained, whether alternative proposals existed, and what explanation the official provided.

None of that information automatically excuses or justifies the vote. It establishes the context necessary to interpret it.

A reader can then reach a judgment based on a more complete understanding of the decision.

This distinction is essential because political messaging frequently compresses complicated decisions into simple moral narratives.

Sometimes a simple conclusion is supported by the evidence. Other times, important qualifications have been removed.

The responsibility of the reader is to determine which situation applies.

Why Certainty Is So Attractive

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, particularly when the consequences of a political decision feel significant.

People want to know which information is reliable, which policies will work, and what future outcomes to expect. Clear answers can provide a sense of control.

Unfortunately, complex questions do not always have simple or definitive answers.

Public policies may involve competing priorities, incomplete data, uncertain projections, and consequences that differ among communities. Reasonable disagreements can exist about values, trade-offs, and preferred approaches even when participants agree on the underlying facts.

Misinformation can exploit our desire for certainty by offering explanations that appear complete.

It may identify a single cause for a complicated problem, present one individual or group as responsible for every consequence, or promise that a particular choice will resolve an issue without meaningful trade-offs.

Such explanations can be emotionally satisfying.

They can also discourage the investigation necessary to understand the subject.

Responsible media literacy requires becoming more comfortable with qualified conclusions.

Sometimes the evidence strongly supports a claim. Sometimes it supports only part of it. Sometimes the available information is insufficient to establish what happened.

Recognizing uncertainty is not the same thing as treating every possibility as equally likely.

It means describing the evidence accurately, including its limitations.

Skepticism Without Cynicism

There is a significant difference between critical thinking and the assumption that nobody can be trusted.

Healthy skepticism asks for evidence and evaluates it. Cynicism may reject evidence in advance because it comes from an institution, professional, or organization the individual distrusts.

Neither unquestioning acceptance nor universal distrust provides a reliable foundation for civic decision-making.

Government records can contain errors. News organizations can publish inaccurate reporting. Experts can disagree or revise their conclusions. Political campaigns can make accurate statements.

The appropriate response is not to place every source into a permanent category of trustworthy or untrustworthy.

Instead, credibility should be evaluated in relation to the specific claim.

A county election office is an appropriate source for its published voting procedures. A campaign website is an appropriate source for a candidate’s stated priorities. A legislative record can document a recorded vote.

Each source has a particular function and limitations.

Understanding those distinctions allows us to investigate information without surrendering judgment to an institution or dismissing useful evidence simply because we distrust its source.

The Courage to Correct Ourselves

One of the clearest expressions of intellectual integrity is the willingness to acknowledge an error.

This can be especially difficult in political conversations, where admitting a mistake may feel like conceding an argument or weakening a broader position.

Yet individual factual claims and larger political values are not identical.

A person can discover that a particular allegation was inaccurate without abandoning every concern that originally made the allegation seem plausible.

They can revise their understanding of a policy without changing all their priorities.

They can acknowledge that a source made an error while continuing to evaluate its other work on the merits.

Correcting ourselves becomes easier when we stop treating every factual disagreement as a contest that must produce a winner.

The purpose of investigation is to improve our understanding.

If new evidence changes that understanding, the investigation has accomplished something valuable.

This also affects how we respond to other people.

Public humiliation may satisfy an immediate desire to demonstrate that someone is wrong, but it does not necessarily help them reconsider their beliefs.

A more productive conversation may begin by identifying the specific claim, asking where the information originated, and examining the available evidence together.

That approach will not resolve every disagreement. Some conversations may remain unproductive, and no one is obligated to participate indefinitely in arguments that are hostile or harmful.

Nevertheless, separating factual questions from personal attacks can create more opportunities for meaningful discussion.

Responsibility in an Age of Endless Sharing

Digital communication has made it possible for ordinary individuals to distribute information to audiences far beyond their immediate communities.

This creates opportunities for education, connection, and civic participation. It also creates responsibilities.

Sharing a political claim does not merely express a personal opinion. It can contribute to the claim’s circulation and perceived legitimacy.

That responsibility does not require perfect knowledge. It requires reasonable care.

Before distributing information, we can consider whether the source is identifiable, whether the claim has been independently corroborated, and whether the material accurately represents its original context.

We can distinguish verified information from speculation.

We can avoid presenting uncertain claims as established facts.

And when we discover an error, we can correct it.

These practices are particularly important in the days immediately surrounding an election, when inaccurate information about voting procedures or results may have practical consequences.

But their value extends well beyond November.

Public decisions continue after elections. Governments implement policies, legislatures consider proposals, agencies make administrative decisions, and communities debate their priorities.

The need to evaluate information does not disappear when a ballot has been cast.

Choosing Curiosity Over Certainty

Media literacy is sometimes presented as a defensive skill: a way to avoid being deceived by other people.

That is certainly one of its purposes.

But its deeper value lies in helping us recognize the limitations of our own assumptions.

We cannot eliminate every bias, know every relevant fact, or investigate every claim we encounter. We can, however, develop habits that make our conclusions more responsive to evidence.

We can ask whether we would apply the same standards to information that challenged our preferred position.

We can recognize when an emotional response is encouraging us to share something before verifying it.

We can distinguish what a source actually establishes from what we would like it to establish.

And we can remain open to the possibility that learning something new may require changing our minds.

This is not a demand for political neutrality in our personal lives. People are entitled to values, convictions, and opinions about the communities they inhabit.

It is a recognition that convictions deserve the support of accurate information.

The strongest commitment to an important issue is not necessarily the loudest or most certain. Sometimes it is the willingness to examine the evidence carefully enough to recognize where our understanding needs to change.

The comfortable lie tells us that misinformation is something other people fall for. Media literacy begins when we acknowledge that we are human enough to be vulnerable to it, too.

That acknowledgment is not a weakness. It is the beginning of a more thoughtful relationship with information—and with the responsibilities of civic participation.

For many Americans, casting a ballot is relatively straightforward. They receive their ballot or visit a polling location, make their selections, and complete the process without significant difficulty. For others, participation requires considerably more preparation. Transportation, employment schedules, caregiving responsibilities, disabilities, chronic illnesses, language access, and the availability of accurate information can all influence how easily someone exercises their voting rights. These obstacles are not necessarily visible to other people, and their impact can be difficult to appreciate when we have never encountered them ourselves.

This raises an important distinction between possessing a legal right and having meaningful access to that right. A right may be established in law, but its practical value depends in part on whether the systems responsible for protecting it function as intended. Examining voting accessibility is therefore not simply a matter of discussing individual accommodations. It is an opportunity to consider how our democratic institutions serve people whose circumstances, abilities, and resources differ.

The Difference Between Legal Protection and Practical Access

The United States has several federal laws designed to protect voting rights and improve accessibility, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Help America Vote Act. These laws establish important protections, but their existence does not guarantee that every voter will experience an accessible election.

Consider a polling location equipped with an accessible entrance. The presence of that entrance is meaningful only if voters can actually use it. A locked door, an obstructed pathway, inadequate signage, or election workers who do not understand the available accommodations can turn an otherwise accessible facility into a significant obstacle. Similarly, accessible voting equipment provides little practical benefit if it is unavailable, malfunctioning, or operated by personnel who have not received appropriate training.

Accessibility must therefore be understood as more than a collection of physical features or written policies. It depends on implementation, maintenance, communication, and the ability of voters to use the resources intended to support them. An accommodation that exists only on paper does not provide meaningful access.

The same distinction applies to voting barriers that are not directly related to disability. A polling location may operate during legally required hours while remaining difficult to reach for someone with an inflexible work schedule. A jurisdiction may provide absentee voting options without ensuring that eligible voters can easily find accurate instructions for using them. Election officials may publish extensive guidance, but that information is less useful when it is difficult to locate, inaccessible in its format, or written in language that voters struggle to understand.

These examples illustrate why evaluating election accessibility requires attention to the entire voting process. Legal protections establish essential standards, but the experiences of individual voters reveal whether those standards are being met in practice.

The Invisible Labor of Voting With a Disability

As someone who lives with multiple disabilities, I understand that completing an activity does not necessarily mean it was easy to accomplish. Other people may see the result without recognizing the preparation, physical effort, or consequences involved.

Attending an event, keeping an appointment, or completing an ordinary errand can require decisions about pain levels, available energy, transportation, environmental conditions, and what other responsibilities may need to be postponed. An activity that appears relatively simple from the outside may involve substantial planning, and the effects may continue long after the activity itself has ended.

Voting can create similar challenges.

For someone living with chronic pain, standing in a lengthy line may aggravate symptoms or make participation physically difficult. A voter with dysautonomia may experience significant problems with prolonged standing or heat exposure. Someone with sensory processing differences may find a crowded polling location overwhelming because of lighting, noise, unfamiliar procedures, or the number of people present. A person whose disability fluctuates may have difficulty predicting whether they will be physically capable of following an Election Day plan made weeks earlier.

None of these experiences necessarily conforms to the public’s expectations of what disability looks like. Accessibility discussions often emphasize wheelchair ramps and other visible architectural accommodations, which are undeniably important. However, physical access to a building is only one component of a much broader process.

Some voters require communication accommodations, accessible ballot-marking equipment, assistance with reading or marking a ballot, additional time to process instructions, or alternatives to in-person voting. Others may need more than one accommodation, and those needs can change depending on their circumstances.

Meaningful accessibility does not require every voter to participate in precisely the same way. Instead, it requires election systems to provide lawful, workable options that allow eligible voters to exercise their rights without unnecessary barriers.

Treating everyone identically may appear equitable in theory, but identical procedures do not always produce equitable access when people have different needs.

Economic and Logistical Barriers to Participation

Disability is an essential part of the conversation about voting access, but it is not the only factor that determines whether participation is practical.

Employment is one example. A voter who works a long shift on Election Day may have limited opportunities to reach a polling location, particularly when public transportation is unreliable or the polling place is far from home. Some jurisdictions provide early voting, absentee voting, or protections for employees who need time away from work to cast a ballot. Individual employers may also offer benefits beyond what the law requires.

I once worked for an employer that provided paid time off for voting, and that experience made me appreciate how much workplace policies can influence participation. An employee who can vote without sacrificing wages faces a different set of circumstances from someone who must choose between taking unpaid leave and meeting essential household expenses.

For workers living paycheck to paycheck, losing even a small amount of income can have consequences. When transportation costs, childcare, eldercare, or additional employment responsibilities are involved, the logistical burden becomes more complicated.

These barriers can be especially significant in rural communities, where voting locations may be separated by considerable distances and transportation alternatives are limited. A person who does not drive may depend on family members, friends, public transportation, or community assistance to reach a polling location.

The familiar suggestion that people will find a way to vote if they care enough overlooks these differences. It assumes that determination can compensate for a lack of time, money, transportation, physical capacity, or support.

Personal preparation remains important, and voters benefit from understanding their deadlines and available options. However, acknowledging individual responsibility should not prevent us from recognizing that participation requires substantially more effort for some people than for others.

The same civic right can involve very different practical experiences depending on the circumstances of the person attempting to exercise it.

Assistance, Autonomy, and the Right to Make Your Own Decisions

One of the most important principles in accessible voting is the distinction between receiving assistance and surrendering decision-making authority.

Under Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, voters who need assistance because of blindness, disability, or an inability to read or write generally have the right to receive help from a person of their choice, subject to specific exceptions involving employers and union representatives.

This protection recognizes that a voter may understand their political preferences and make informed decisions while still requiring assistance with the mechanics of casting a ballot.

A person might need help reading instructions, physically marking selections, communicating with election workers, or navigating an unfamiliar voting procedure. These needs do not automatically diminish that person’s ability to evaluate candidates, understand issues, or determine which choices reflect their values.

Unfortunately, assumptions about disability can sometimes blur the distinction between practical assistance and personal autonomy. People may mistakenly equate physical dependence, communication differences, neurodivergence, or the need for daily support with an inability to make political decisions.

Such assumptions can undermine the very rights that accessibility measures are intended to protect.

Questions involving guardianship and voting eligibility can be legally complicated, and the applicable rules vary by state. It is therefore important not to assume that someone has lost their right to vote simply because they receive assistance in other areas of life.

Respecting voting autonomy means recognizing that the voter remains the decision-maker. Assistance should support the individual’s ability to express their preferences, not provide an opportunity for another person to substitute their own judgment.

This principle extends beyond election procedures. It reflects a broader understanding of disability rights in which people are entitled to appropriate support without automatically losing control over their choices.

What Effective Accessibility Can Look Like

Discussions about accessibility understandably devote considerable attention to failures. Broken equipment, inaccessible facilities, inadequate communication, and improperly handled accommodation requests deserve scrutiny because they can interfere with legally protected rights.

However, successful accessibility also deserves recognition.

When election officials anticipate different voter needs, train their personnel, maintain accessible equipment, and communicate available options clearly, they reduce the uncertainty that can discourage participation. A voter who knows what accommodations are available and encounters a process that functions as described may be able to participate with greater confidence and independence.

These outcomes should not be regarded as extraordinary favors or exceptional acts of generosity. They are examples of public systems carrying out their responsibilities effectively.

An accessible election process should not depend on a disabled voter having to persuade someone that their needs are legitimate or express gratitude for receiving a legally required accommodation. The objective is to make accessible participation an ordinary part of election administration.

This requires more than purchasing equipment or publishing policies. Election workers need training, voters need reliable information, and procedures must account for the possibility that something may go wrong.

When accessibility is incorporated into planning rather than treated as an afterthought, the benefits extend beyond any single group of voters. Clear instructions, functional systems, knowledgeable personnel, and multiple lawful voting options can make participation easier for people facing a wide range of circumstances.

Information Is Part of Accessibility

A voting accommodation cannot benefit someone who does not know it exists. Likewise, a legal protection may offer little practical assistance if a voter does not understand when or how to invoke it.

This is one reason reliable information is such an important part of meaningful civic participation.

A voter may be unaware that their employer provides voting leave, that their jurisdiction offers accessible ballot-marking equipment, or that certain problems with a mail ballot can be corrected through an established process. Someone encountering an obstacle may not know which election office to contact or what assistance is available.

These information gaps can discourage participation even when lawful options exist.

Misinformation can create additional barriers. An inaccurate claim about voter identification requirements may convince an eligible voter that they cannot cast a ballot. Outdated registration information may cause confusion about deadlines. Misleading statements about disability accommodations may discourage people from requesting assistance to which they are entitled.

The consequences of inaccurate election information are not limited to confusion. In some circumstances, they can affect whether someone attempts to vote at all.

Throughout Civic Witch, I emphasize the importance of verifying claims through reliable sources rather than accepting social media posts, political commentary, or secondhand information at face value. That principle is especially important when the information concerns voting procedures.

Election rules vary by jurisdiction, and details about registration, identification, ballot submission, accessible voting options, and deadlines should be confirmed with the appropriate election authorities.

The purpose of encouraging this research is not to place an unreasonable burden on individual voters or suggest that everyone must become an expert in election administration. It is to help people identify trustworthy information and understand the options available to them.

At the same time, public institutions have a responsibility to communicate procedures clearly. Accessibility should not depend entirely on a voter’s ability to navigate confusing websites, interpret complicated legal language, or independently discover information that could have been provided more effectively.

An informed voter benefits from reliable resources, but a genuinely accessible system also makes those resources easier to find and use.

Voting Access Is Not a Partisan Question

People can disagree strongly about political candidates, ballot measures, government spending, and the appropriate role of public institutions while still recognizing the importance of lawful and accessible election procedures.

Supporting meaningful access does not require endorsing a particular candidate or telling anyone how to vote. It requires examining whether eligible voters can use the processes established for their participation and whether those processes comply with applicable protections.

That examination should be grounded in evidence.

Claims about inaccessible facilities, malfunctioning equipment, improper assistance, or other voting barriers deserve careful investigation. At the same time, allegations should be evaluated against reliable information rather than accepted or dismissed solely because they align with someone’s political preferences.

Election administration involves real procedures, legal obligations, and practical limitations. Understanding those details is more useful than treating every reported difficulty as proof of a broader political narrative.

When a barrier is documented, the important questions concern its cause, its effect on voters, and what measures would prevent it from recurring.

The experiences of voters who encounter difficulties should not be reduced to talking points. They deserve to be understood as part of evaluating how well our electoral systems function.

Participation Does Not End on Election Day

The November 3 election provides an immediate reason to consider voting access, but the underlying issues extend beyond any single election cycle.

Accessible civic participation depends on institutions that communicate clearly, respond to legitimate concerns, and recognize the different circumstances of the people they serve. Elections provide one particularly important opportunity to evaluate those responsibilities.

For voters preparing to participate, practical planning remains valuable. Confirming registration status, reviewing applicable deadlines, understanding available voting methods, and learning about accommodations can help reduce avoidable complications. People who require assistance may also benefit from identifying the appropriate election office or reliable support resources before they need them.

My public companion resource guide for Civic Witch Episode Four, Before You Vote, brings together official resources for voter registration, ballot information, deadlines, accessibility, and other aspects of election preparation. It is intended to help voters locate the information relevant to their own circumstances rather than rely on generalized advice that may not apply where they live.

For disabled voters, I want to emphasize that needing an accommodation does not make your participation less legitimate. Requiring assistance with the voting process does not mean surrendering your political judgment, and encountering barriers does not diminish the importance of your voice.

The responsibility for meaningful accessibility cannot rest entirely on the people who need it. Election officials, policymakers, employers, community organizations, and the public all have roles in recognizing obstacles and supporting systems that function fairly and effectively.

After ballots have been counted, those responsibilities remain. We can continue paying attention to how election procedures operate, whether legally required accommodations are available, and how reliable information reaches the people who need it.

Democratic participation is often described in terms of the choices people make at the ballot box. Those choices matter enormously, but so does the opportunity to make them.

A right is most meaningful when the people entitled to exercise it have a genuine opportunity to do so.

Ensuring that opportunity requires more than declaring that everyone has a voice. It requires examining whether the systems intended to hear those voices are accessible in practice.

Stay curious, stay informed, and go out and make good trouble.

Namaste, Witchlings. 🔮💜

At some point, the pursuit of personal growth can begin to resemble a never-ending home renovation project. We identify something that needs improvement, develop a plan to address it, make some progress, and immediately discover another area requiring attention.

Our habits could be healthier. Our schedules could be more organized. Our relationships could be stronger. Our emotional responses could be better regulated. We could be more disciplined, more productive, more patient, more confident, or more consistent.

There’s almost always something we could do differently.

The difficulty isn’t that these observations are necessarily wrong. Human beings are capable of learning, changing, and developing new skills throughout their lives. The difficulty arises when we begin treating every opportunity for growth as evidence that our present selves are somehow inadequate.

We become so accustomed to evaluating ourselves that simply existing without conducting an internal performance review can feel unfamiliar.

Personal development stops being something we pursue because we’re curious about what might be possible and becomes something we feel obligated to pursue because we believe we’re unacceptable as we are.

That’s an exhausting way to live.

And it raises an important question: When did being human become a problem that required constant correction?

The Endless Improvement Project

We live in a culture saturated with advice about becoming better versions of ourselves. There are programs for improving our sleep, systems for organizing our schedules, strategies for developing healthier habits, and endless recommendations for becoming more productive.

We can track our movement, monitor our moods, analyze our spending, measure our concentration, and evaluate nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

Some of these resources can be genuinely helpful. Information and practical tools can support meaningful changes, particularly when we’re trying to address a specific difficulty or develop a skill that matters to us.

But the sheer volume of improvement-oriented messaging can create an underlying assumption that we’re always falling short.

If our morning routine isn’t optimized, we should fix it. If our home isn’t organized, we need a better system. If our relationships feel complicated, we should improve our communication skills. If we’re struggling with motivation, we need more discipline.

There’s always another habit to establish, another weakness to overcome, or another area of our lives that could supposedly benefit from additional attention.

And because there’s no definitive endpoint to personal growth, we may never reach a moment when we feel permitted to be satisfied.

Satisfaction itself can begin to seem suspicious. We worry that accepting where we are will make us complacent, that appreciating our progress will reduce our motivation, or that taking a break from self-improvement means we’re falling behind.

But behind whom? And according to whose standards?

The idea that we must continually become more capable, more efficient, or more accomplished assumes that human life is fundamentally a competition against an ever-improving ideal.

That ideal isn’t necessarily connected to our values, circumstances, or genuine needs.

Sometimes it’s simply another expectation we’ve absorbed without examining whether it deserves a place in our lives.

Growth and Self-Rejection Are Not the Same Thing

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to change.

Learning new skills can be satisfying. Examining our beliefs can help us develop a more informed understanding of the world. Recognizing harmful patterns can improve our relationships, and developing new strategies for navigating difficult circumstances can make our lives more manageable.

Sometimes change is also an ethical responsibility. If we discover that our behavior is hurting someone, we have reason to examine that behavior and consider how to address the harm. If new information challenges a belief we’ve held for years, intellectual honesty requires us to consider whether that belief remains justified.

Growth can be meaningful, necessary, and deeply rewarding.

But there is a substantial difference between pursuing growth because we value learning and pursuing it because we believe we’re fundamentally inadequate.

The first approach begins with curiosity. We recognize something we’d like to understand, experience, or accomplish, and we explore how to make that possible.

The second begins with rejection. We identify something about ourselves that we consider unacceptable and attempt to correct it in the hope that we’ll eventually become worthy of our own approval.

When self-rejection is the foundation of our motivation, accomplishments may provide only temporary relief.

We reach a goal and feel satisfied for a moment, but that satisfaction quickly gives way to another perceived deficiency. Instead of appreciating what we’ve learned, we begin examining what still needs improvement.

The process becomes self-perpetuating because the underlying belief—that we’re not good enough as we are—remains unchanged.

No achievement can permanently resolve a problem that isn’t actually about achievement.

This distinction doesn’t mean we should abandon our ambitions or refuse to examine our behavior. It means we deserve to understand why we’re pursuing change and whether our motivation is helping us build a life we value or simply reinforcing the belief that we’ll never be enough.

When Self-Awareness Becomes Self-Surveillance

Self-awareness is an important part of personal development. Recognizing our patterns, understanding our reactions, and examining our assumptions can help us make more deliberate choices.

But even self-awareness can become excessive.

We can become so accustomed to analyzing ourselves that ordinary experiences begin to feel like evidence requiring investigation.

A difficult emotional response becomes a question about our emotional maturity. Trouble concentrating becomes evidence of insufficient discipline. A desire for solitude raises concerns about whether we’re withdrawing from relationships. Frustration with another person becomes an opportunity to scrutinize our communication skills.

Even enjoyable experiences can become uncomfortable when we start evaluating whether we’re using our time appropriately.

Instead of simply having an afternoon, we’re assessing whether the afternoon was productive, restorative, meaningful, or sufficiently aligned with our goals.

This constant monitoring can make it difficult to experience our lives without simultaneously judging them.

Of course, there are times when examining our reactions is useful. If a particular conflict keeps occurring, understanding our contribution to it may help us make different choices. If we’re struggling with a persistent difficulty, exploring its causes may reveal opportunities for support.

But not every emotion requires an explanation, and not every uncomfortable experience indicates a problem with our character.

Sometimes we’re tired, disappointed, irritated, or simply uninterested in an activity.

Those experiences are part of being human.

We don’t necessarily need to transform them into lessons, diagnoses, or personal development opportunities.

There is value in understanding ourselves, but there is also value in allowing ourselves to exist without constant evaluation.

The Wellness Industry and the Promise of a Better You

The relationship between self-improvement and self-rejection becomes particularly complicated when we consider the industries built around personal well-being.

An enormous amount of money can be made by convincing people that something about their lives is inadequate and offering a product or service as the solution.

Our bodies are supposedly the wrong shape. Our routines aren’t disciplined enough. Our homes aren’t sufficiently organized. Our minds aren’t focused enough. Our relationships aren’t healthy enough.

The solution, conveniently, is often available through a program, subscription, product, or carefully branded lifestyle.

As someone who works in yoga, wellness, and spiritual education, I think this deserves serious examination.

There are dedicated teachers, practitioners, and professionals offering genuinely valuable support. People can benefit tremendously from accessible movement practices, educational resources, therapeutic services, and opportunities for spiritual exploration.

But the existence of helpful resources doesn’t excuse marketing practices that depend on manufacturing insecurity.

We have a responsibility to consider what our services communicate about the people we’re trying to support.

Are we helping people develop greater agency and understanding? Are we respecting individual circumstances, limitations, and priorities? Are we providing information that allows people to make informed decisions?

Or are we encouraging people to believe they’re deficient so they’ll feel compelled to purchase a solution?

The distinction matters.

Wellness should not require people to believe they’re fundamentally unwell. Spiritual exploration shouldn’t depend on convincing someone that they’re spiritually inadequate. And yoga should not become another environment where people are expected to prove their worth through physical performance.

This is especially important in spaces that claim to prioritize accessibility and inclusion.

If we tell people that every body is welcome but continually promote an idealized version of health, flexibility, appearance, or spiritual achievement, our messaging may contradict our stated values.

If we encourage people to listen to their bodies but treat modifications as lesser accomplishments, we’re reinforcing the very expectations we claim to challenge.

And if we present wellness as a personal responsibility without acknowledging disability, economic barriers, discrimination, and unequal access to resources, we risk blaming people for circumstances they cannot simply overcome through better habits.

Meaningful support should expand people’s choices rather than create new reasons for shame.

Being a Work in Progress Doesn’t Mean Being Incomplete

One of the assumptions underlying compulsory self-improvement is that being unfinished means being incomplete.

We imagine that somewhere in the future exists a more fully developed version of ourselves: someone who has resolved their insecurities, established reliable routines, mastered emotional regulation, and finally become the person they were always supposed to be.

But human beings aren’t static projects with a final completion date.

We learn, age, encounter new circumstances, develop relationships, and revise our understanding of the world. Our bodies change. Our priorities shift. Our experiences influence how we interpret ourselves and others.

This ongoing development doesn’t mean we’re defective versions of some future ideal.

It means we’re alive.

We can be learning without being inadequate. We can have limitations without being failures. We can acknowledge mistakes without reducing our entire identities to those mistakes.

And we can want something different for our futures without declaring our present selves unworthy.

This perspective also has important implications for accountability.

When we believe that making a mistake means we’re fundamentally bad, acknowledging harm can feel threatening. We may become defensive, rationalize our behavior, or avoid confronting the consequences because admitting the mistake seems equivalent to condemning ourselves.

But when our worth isn’t dependent on flawless behavior, we may find it easier to recognize where we’ve caused harm and take meaningful responsibility.

Accountability and self-respect aren’t opposing principles.

We can acknowledge that something we’ve done was harmful without concluding that we’re incapable of doing better. We can make amends where possible, change our behavior, and learn from the experience without treating self-punishment as proof of sincerity.

We don’t have to destroy ourselves to improve ourselves.

Acceptance Is Not Resignation

One of the most common concerns about self-acceptance is that it will eliminate our motivation to change.

If we accept our limitations, will we stop trying? If we acknowledge our circumstances, will we become complacent? If we stop criticizing ourselves, how will we maintain discipline?

These concerns make sense in a culture that frequently treats dissatisfaction as the primary source of motivation.

But acceptance and resignation are not the same thing.

Acceptance means recognizing what is true about our circumstances right now. Resignation means deciding that those circumstances cannot change or aren’t worth attempting to change.

The distinction is significant.

I can acknowledge that my body has limitations today while continuing to explore ways to improve my quality of life. I can recognize that a relationship is struggling while considering whether and how it might be repaired. I can accept that I’ve made mistakes without deciding those mistakes must determine my future.

Likewise, I can recognize that a goal is currently beyond my capacity without concluding that it will remain impossible forever.

Acceptance provides information about our starting point.

And accurate information is essential when we’re making meaningful decisions.

If we refuse to acknowledge our limitations, we may repeatedly make commitments we cannot sustain. If we deny that a relationship is experiencing difficulties, we cannot address those difficulties effectively. If we insist that our current circumstances should be different simply because we dislike them, we may spend considerable energy fighting reality rather than identifying what we can actually influence.

Acceptance doesn’t guarantee that change will be possible, and it doesn’t require us to be happy about every aspect of our circumstances.

It allows us to respond to what is real rather than what we believe should be real.

That’s not giving up.

It’s approaching our lives with greater clarity.

What Becomes Possible When We Stop Fighting Ourselves?

An extraordinary amount of energy can be consumed by the belief that our ordinary human needs and limitations are personal failures.

We criticize ourselves for requiring sleep, resent our bodies for changing, become frustrated when concentration fluctuates, and judge ourselves for experiencing emotions that don’t fit our preferred self-image.

We compare our progress with people whose circumstances we don’t fully understand and measure our lives against standards that may never have reflected our values in the first place.

The result can be a constant struggle against the reality of being human.

And that struggle has a cost.

Energy spent criticizing ourselves isn’t available for the relationships, interests, causes, and experiences that matter to us. Time devoted to evaluating our supposed deficiencies is time we could spend engaging with our actual lives.

Imagine what might become possible if we redirected even a portion of that energy.

We might have more room for creativity and curiosity. We might become more present in our relationships. We might pursue meaningful goals because we genuinely value them rather than because we believe accomplishment will finally make us acceptable.

We might also begin questioning the expectations we place on other people.

When we stop measuring our own worth through productivity, appearance, or achievement, it becomes easier to recognize how those same standards can harm others.

We can work toward communities where people aren’t required to demonstrate exceptional productivity, perfect health, or endless resilience before they’re treated with dignity.

We can advocate for environments that recognize different abilities, circumstances, and needs.

And we can begin building lives that are more livable rather than simply more efficient.

The purpose of caring for ourselves shouldn’t be to become increasingly effective at meeting everyone else’s expectations.

It should include making room for lives we genuinely want to experience.

Strength Without Strain

As we conclude this week’s exploration of strength without strain, I keep returning to the distinction between meaningful growth and unnecessary self-rejection.

Strength isn’t always about becoming more capable, more accomplished, or more disciplined. Sometimes it involves recognizing the resources and qualities we already possess.

We have the capacity to learn, the ability to reconsider our assumptions, and the opportunity to make choices that better reflect our values. We can acknowledge our needs, recognize our limitations, and develop the discernment to distinguish meaningful effort from unnecessary strain.

None of those abilities requires us to believe we’re fundamentally inadequate.

We can pursue growth without making self-acceptance conditional on reaching a destination. We can develop discipline without turning every moment into an obligation. And we can care deeply about our lives without treating ourselves as problems requiring constant correction.

Being human isn’t a defect that needs to be overcome.

It’s the experience we’re actually here to have.

A Moment for Reflection

Consider whether there are aspects of yourself you’ve been treating as problems when they may simply be ordinary parts of being human. Which goals genuinely reflect your values, and which have become attempts to prove that you’re acceptable?

It may also be worth asking what you could do with the energy you currently spend criticizing yourself for not being someone else.

These questions don’t require a five-year plan, a collection of measurable objectives, or another personal development program. They’re simply opportunities to examine the assumptions shaping your relationship with yourself.

Growth remains possible. Change remains possible. Learning, accountability, and meaningful development all remain possible.

But none of those things requires us to postpone self-respect until we’ve become a different person.

You are not a problem to be solved. You’re a person to be cared for, and that includes the care you offer yourself.

1. Who Benefits When I Believe I’m Never Enough?

Consider the messages you’ve received about becoming a better version of yourself. How many of those messages encourage genuine well-being, and how many suggest that something about you needs fixing? Think about the industries, institutions, or social expectations that benefit when people continually feel inadequate. How have those messages influenced the goals you’ve set for yourself, and which goals would you still pursue if you had nothing to prove?

2. What Does My Body Owe the World?

Reflect on the expectations society places on bodies to be healthy, attractive, productive, independent, and physically capable. Which of those expectations have you internalized? Have you ever felt obligated to explain your health, appearance, disability, or physical limitations to someone else? What might change if you began treating your body as something you inhabit rather than something you must continually justify to the world?

3. When Did Self-Care Become Another Performance?

Think about the ways self-care is presented in advertising, wellness culture, and social media. Have you ever felt pressure to maintain a particular routine, purchase certain products, or demonstrate that you’re actively working on yourself? How do you distinguish between practices that genuinely support your well-being and activities that have become another measure of productivity? What would caring for yourself look like if nobody else ever saw the results?

4. Can I Celebrate Growth Without Making It a Requirement?

Consider an accomplishment you’re proud of, whether physical, emotional, professional, or personal. What made that achievement meaningful to you? Now imagine that circumstances had prevented you from reaching the same outcome despite your best efforts. Would you view yourself differently? How can you honor your accomplishments while recognizing that people who cannot achieve the same things are equally deserving of dignity and respect?

5. What Would a Life Without Conditional Worthiness Look Like?

Imagine living in a world where rest doesn’t need to be earned, disability isn’t treated as a personal failure, and people aren’t valued according to their appearance, productivity, or independence. How would your relationship with yourself change? How might your relationships, priorities, and communities look different? What is one belief or expectation you could begin challenging in your own life to make that vision a little more real?

There is a peculiar contradiction in the way modern society talks about bodies. We’re constantly told that we should love ourselves, accept ourselves, and recognize that everyone is beautiful in their own way. At the same time, we’re surrounded by messages insisting that our bodies are projects requiring continuous improvement. We should be stronger, thinner, more flexible, more energetic, more disciplined, and somehow perpetually capable of becoming better versions of ourselves.

The language may have softened over the years, but the underlying expectation hasn’t changed nearly as much as we’d like to believe. Where we once encountered advertisements promising the perfect beach body, we now encounter wellness messaging about optimizing our health, maximizing our potential, and becoming our healthiest selves.

Some of those goals can be meaningful when they’re freely chosen and pursued with appropriate support. But when improvement becomes a moral obligation, the message is no longer simply about physical well-being. It becomes a statement about who deserves admiration, respect, and belonging.

And unfortunately, yoga has not escaped this way of thinking.

Despite its philosophical roots, contemporary physical yoga is frequently presented through images of exceptional flexibility, strength, balance, and physical appearance. Social media rewards the spectacular. Marketing campaigns feature bodies that conform to narrow ideals of attractiveness and athleticism. Even language intended to inspire practitioners can reinforce the idea that progress is something we demonstrate through increasingly impressive physical accomplishments.

Somewhere in that environment, it’s remarkably easy to forget that yoga was never supposed to be a competition for human worthiness.

The Body We Think We’re Supposed to Have

Many people approach yoga with a complicated relationship with their bodies long before they ever step onto a mat.

Some have spent years being told that their weight makes them unhealthy, unattractive, or undisciplined. Others have experienced criticism because of their age, disability, physical differences, or inability to participate in activities that society considers normal.

Still others have lived through injuries, illnesses, pregnancies, surgeries, or other experiences that changed their bodies in ways they never anticipated.

And then there are people who have been praised for their physical abilities, only to discover how fragile that praise can become when those abilities change.

When we live in a culture that rewards bodies for what they can accomplish, it’s understandable that we might begin measuring our value through performance.

If we can do more, we feel successful. If we can do less, we feel as though we’ve lost something essential about ourselves.

Yoga can become another environment where that belief is reinforced, particularly when we’re encouraged to compare our current abilities with an idealized version of what a practitioner should look like.

But our bodies are not résumés.

We don’t accumulate worth through flexibility, strength, endurance, or the ability to maintain a difficult posture. We don’t become less deserving of dignity because our mobility changes, our energy fluctuates, or our bodies require assistance.

Those things describe aspects of our physical experience. They do not determine our value as human beings.

When Progress Becomes a Moral Judgment

I think one of the most damaging ideas within wellness culture is the assumption that physical progress is always evidence of virtue.

Someone who develops greater strength is praised for discipline. Someone who achieves a challenging posture is admired for dedication. Someone who changes their appearance is celebrated for commitment and perseverance.

But what happens when a person works just as hard and doesn’t achieve the same results?

What happens when chronic illness, disability, genetics, injury, medication, or countless other circumstances affect what their body can do?

What happens when maintaining existing abilities requires enormous effort, or when a person’s health changes despite doing everything they’ve been advised to do?

If we treat physical outcomes as proof of character, we inevitably create a hierarchy in which people whose bodies respond differently are assumed to be less disciplined, less committed, or somehow responsible for their circumstances.

That’s not a fair assessment of human beings, and it’s certainly not an appropriate foundation for an inclusive yoga practice.

The ability to perform a posture tells us very little about someone’s dedication, resilience, or relationship with yoga. A person who can comfortably hold an advanced balance may have spent years developing that skill, and their accomplishment can be meaningful to them. But someone who spends those same years navigating unpredictable pain, fatigue, or mobility limitations may demonstrate equally meaningful dedication through a practice that looks entirely different.

Neither person’s worth is determined by the appearance of their practice.

And neither owes anyone an explanation for what their body can or cannot accomplish.

The Myth of the Ideal Yoga Body

One of the things that frustrates me about the commercialization of yoga is how frequently the practice is represented through a remarkably narrow range of bodies.

We see young, thin, conventionally attractive, able-bodied practitioners demonstrating postures in beautifully curated spaces. Their clothing coordinates, their surroundings are immaculate, and their movements appear effortless.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone enjoying that aesthetic or sharing their practice publicly. The problem emerges when those images become the dominant representation of what yoga is supposed to look like.

Because yoga doesn’t belong exclusively to people who can fold themselves into extraordinary shapes.

It belongs to the person practicing in a chair because standing isn’t accessible. It belongs to the practitioner whose body has changed after surgery. It belongs to the person navigating chronic pain, the older adult discovering movement for the first time, and the individual who has never felt comfortable in a traditional fitness environment.

It also belongs to people who simply aren’t interested in pursuing advanced physical postures.

Not everyone comes to yoga with the same goals, and not everyone needs to.

The physical appearance of a practice cannot tell us whether someone is developing concentration, exploring the relationship between effort and ease, or cultivating a more thoughtful relationship with their body.

Those experiences aren’t always visible, and they don’t have to be.

When Our Bodies Change Without Our Permission

There is a particular kind of grief that can accompany changes in physical ability, especially when those changes are unexpected or permanent.

A movement that once felt effortless may become difficult. Activities that were once part of everyday life may require planning, adaptation, or assistance. Sometimes the body we remember inhabiting no longer responds the way it used to.

For people living with chronic illness or disability, these changes may not follow a predictable path. Some days offer greater capacity than others, and the uncertainty itself can be exhausting.

It can be tempting to interpret these experiences as evidence that we’ve somehow failed our bodies or that our bodies have failed us.

But illness is not a character flaw. Disability is not a moral deficiency. Aging is not evidence of insufficient discipline.

And no amount of positive thinking, spiritual dedication, or determination guarantees that our bodies will behave the way we want them to.

I believe it’s important to say that plainly because wellness culture has an unfortunate tendency to suggest that people can overcome virtually any physical challenge if they adopt the right mindset, follow the right routine, or commit themselves strongly enough to healing.

That message may sound empowering to someone who has experienced improvement through a particular practice. But for people whose conditions are progressive, unpredictable, or resistant to treatment, it can become another source of blame.

Yoga can be a valuable part of someone’s relationship with their body, but it is not a cure for every condition, and it does not make us immune to the realities of human biology.

We can appreciate the benefits of practice without pretending that those benefits are universal or guaranteed.

And we can grieve changes in our abilities without treating that grief as a failure of acceptance.

What Does Acceptance Actually Mean?

Acceptance is one of those words that can sound beautiful in theory and feel considerably more complicated in practice.

When we talk about accepting our bodies, it’s easy to imagine that acceptance means feeling grateful for every physical sensation, loving every aspect of our appearance, and remaining emotionally unaffected by changes in our abilities.

But that’s an unrealistic expectation.

We can respect our bodies while feeling frustrated by their limitations. We can recognize our inherent worth while grieving abilities we’ve lost. We can make thoughtful choices about our health while acknowledging that some circumstances are beyond our control.

Acceptance doesn’t require us to celebrate every aspect of our physical experience.

It asks us to recognize reality without turning that reality into a judgment about our value.

On the yoga mat, that might mean acknowledging that a posture isn’t accessible today without deciding that we’re inadequate. It might involve choosing a modification while still feeling disappointed that we need it. Or it might mean recognizing that rest is appropriate even when we’d rather have the energy to continue.

Those experiences can coexist.

We don’t have to resolve every uncomfortable emotion before we’re allowed to treat ourselves with care.

The Difference Between Growth and Self-Rejection

There’s an important distinction between wanting to develop a skill and believing that we’re unacceptable until we achieve it.

A practitioner might enjoy working toward greater balance, strength, or mobility. They may find satisfaction in noticing how their abilities change over time or in accomplishing something that once felt difficult.

Those goals can be perfectly compatible with a compassionate relationship with the body.

The problem arises when the pursuit of improvement becomes conditional self-acceptance.

When we tell ourselves that we’ll finally feel proud once we can perform a particular posture, or that we’ll deserve confidence once our bodies look a certain way, we’re placing our worth somewhere perpetually beyond our current experience.

And the finish line has a habit of moving.

Once one goal is achieved, another appears. Once one perceived flaw is addressed, another becomes the focus of attention.

We can spend years pursuing a version of ourselves that we believe will finally be worthy of appreciation, without recognizing that our value was never dependent on reaching that destination.

Yoga offers us an opportunity to challenge that pattern.

We can pursue growth because we’re curious about our capabilities, not because our current bodies are unacceptable.

We can celebrate improvement without treating it as proof that we’ve become better human beings.

And we can recognize that some forms of progress have nothing to do with increased physical ability.

Sometimes progress means becoming more comfortable using a prop. Sometimes it means recognizing fatigue before reaching exhaustion. Sometimes it means letting go of a goal that no longer serves our circumstances.

And sometimes progress is simply discovering that we don’t have to prove anything at all.

Dhāraṇā and the Attention We Give Ourselves

Throughout October, we’re exploring Dhāraṇā, the sixth limb of yoga, traditionally associated with concentration and the deliberate direction of attention.

Within classical yoga philosophy, Dhāraṇā involves focusing the mind upon a chosen point or area. Its traditional purpose is connected to the development of meditative discipline, rather than body image or physical achievement.

But the subject of attention offers a useful opportunity to consider what happens when we become preoccupied with evaluating our bodies.

During physical yoga practice, our attention can easily become occupied with comparison. We may focus on how far someone else can stretch, how long they can maintain a posture, or how closely our movements resemble the instructor’s demonstration.

We may also become absorbed in memories of what our bodies used to accomplish or expectations about what they should eventually be able to do.

Those thoughts can be powerful, particularly when they’re connected to long-standing beliefs about our worth.

But what might change if we began directing our attention toward the experience we’re actually having?

Instead of asking whether our posture looks impressive, we might notice whether it feels stable. Instead of measuring ourselves against another practitioner, we might recognize the choices available to us. Instead of interpreting every limitation as evidence of failure, we might consider what information our bodies are providing.

That shift doesn’t automatically eliminate insecurity or self-judgment. Those patterns may have developed over many years, and they deserve patience rather than another demand for immediate improvement.

But learning to notice where our attention goes can help us recognize when we’re treating our bodies as objects to be evaluated rather than experiences to be understood.

And that recognition matters.

The Radical Possibility of Being Enough

There’s something quietly radical about stepping onto a yoga mat without treating the experience as an opportunity to prove our worth.

Imagine entering a practice without needing to demonstrate that we’re strong enough, flexible enough, disciplined enough, or sufficiently committed to self-improvement.

Imagine recognizing that our bodies deserve appropriate movement, support, and rest regardless of how they look or what they can accomplish.

Imagine being able to celebrate someone else’s physical achievements without interpreting them as evidence of our own inadequacy.

That kind of relationship with yoga challenges much of what we’re taught about productivity, achievement, and personal value.

It doesn’t mean abandoning goals or pretending that physical development is meaningless. It means refusing to make our dignity conditional upon the outcomes of those goals.

And for people who have spent years being told that their bodies are problems to solve, that distinction can be enormously important.

We are not required to become more physically capable before we’re allowed to participate fully in our own lives.

We don’t have to earn rest through exhaustion or support through suffering.

And we don’t need to transform our bodies into something more socially acceptable before we deserve to inhabit them with dignity.

Your HeartFire Reflection

Consider the ways you’ve learned to evaluate your body.

Do you find yourself feeling more confident when your physical abilities improve? Do changes in strength, mobility, or energy influence how you think about yourself?

Have you ever felt that you needed to achieve a particular posture, appearance, or level of fitness before you could consider yourself a successful yoga practitioner?

Now consider what it might mean to separate those achievements from your sense of worth.

You can still appreciate your body’s capabilities. You can still pursue goals that matter to you. You can still feel disappointed when circumstances change or when something you hoped to accomplish remains inaccessible.

But none of those experiences has to determine whether you’re deserving of respect.

You don’t need to force yourself into unconditional body positivity if that language doesn’t resonate with you. For some people, body neutrality—the recognition that our bodies deserve care and respect without requiring constant positive feelings about them—may offer a more accessible perspective.

The invitation is simply to consider whether your relationship with your body could become less dependent on what it produces or accomplishes.

The Lesson We Carry From the Mat

When we stop treating yoga as a demonstration of physical worthiness, we create room for a different kind of practice.

One where strength can coexist with support, where modifications are legitimate choices, and where rest doesn’t need to be justified by exhaustion.

One where physical development is possible but never mandatory, and where the changing realities of our bodies are met with curiosity rather than condemnation.

The mat doesn’t erase the social pressures that shape our relationships with our bodies. It doesn’t automatically undo years of criticism, comparison, or internalized expectations.

But it can offer opportunities to question those messages.

Every time we choose a posture because it serves our body rather than because it looks impressive, we challenge the idea that appearance determines value.

Every time we use support without apology, we reject the assumption that independence is the only acceptable form of strength.

And every time we allow ourselves to rest without treating it as failure, we acknowledge that our worth exists independently of our productivity.

Your body is not a measure of your worth. It is the body through which you experience your life, and it deserves care whether or not it ever accomplishes another impressive thing.

You were worthy before you stepped onto the mat.

You remain worthy when your practice changes.

And you will still be worthy on the days when you cannot practice at all.

Your HeartFire was never dependent on what your body could accomplish.

Stay curious, stay magickal, and keep the HeartFire burning.

Namaste, Witchlings. 🔮💜

There is a peculiar expectation placed upon people who are known for their compassion. Once you’ve established yourself as someone who cares, someone who listens, someone who shows up when others need support, it can begin to feel as though your availability is simply assumed. Your time becomes something other people schedule themselves into. Your emotional energy becomes a resource they expect to draw upon. And somewhere in the middle of trying to be a decent human being, you may discover that you’ve become very good at recognizing everyone else’s needs while quietly neglecting your own.

This isn’t always the result of malicious intent. Sometimes the people around us genuinely don’t recognize how much they’re asking. Sometimes we’ve spent years teaching them that we’ll always find a way to accommodate one more request. And sometimes our own histories have taught us that being useful, agreeable, or endlessly giving is the safest way to maintain relationships.

Whatever the circumstances, the result can be remarkably similar: we find ourselves exhausted, resentful, and wondering why something that began as an expression of love has started to feel like an obligation.

This is where we need to have a conversation about our HeartFire, and why protecting it is every bit as important as sharing it.

Sharing Your Fire Without Burning Yourself Up

Fire is a wonderfully complicated symbol. It represents warmth, transformation, creativity, passion, destruction, and renewal. It can sustain life, illuminate darkness, and bring people together. It can also consume everything within reach when it isn’t tended with care.

Our HeartFire carries a similar complexity. It represents the energy we bring to the things that matter to us: our relationships, our communities, our work, our passions, and the causes we believe in. But unlike a mythical flame that burns eternally without fuel, our capacity is affected by very real circumstances. Sleep, physical health, emotional stress, financial pressures, disability, caregiving responsibilities, and countless other factors influence what we have available to give.

One of the more harmful ideas embedded in modern conversations about resilience is that sufficiently strong or compassionate people should somehow be able to transcend those limitations. We celebrate the person who keeps showing up despite exhaustion, who never seems to say no, and who manages to care for everyone else while appearing to need very little themselves.

What we don’t always see is the cost.

Generosity can be deeply fulfilling, but giving becomes considerably more complicated when it is driven by guilt, fear, or the belief that our worth depends upon how much we sacrifice. There is an enormous difference between choosing to support someone because we genuinely want to and feeling unable to decline because we fear disappointing them.

Neither situation necessarily looks different from the outside. Both may involve helping a friend, volunteering for a cause, or taking on an additional responsibility. The distinction often lies in whether we believe we have a meaningful choice.

Recognizing that difference is an important part of learning to care for ourselves without abandoning our commitment to others.

Boundaries Are Part of Compassion, Not a Rejection of It

Boundaries have acquired an interesting reputation in contemporary wellness culture. They’re sometimes presented as an almost magical solution to difficult relationships: establish a boundary, communicate it confidently, and watch your life become beautifully peaceful.

Unfortunately, human relationships rarely cooperate with such tidy narratives.

Boundaries can be uncomfortable. They may disappoint people we love. They may require difficult conversations, changes to established patterns, or decisions we’d rather not have to make. For people whose experiences have taught them that disagreement can lead to conflict or danger, establishing boundaries may be especially complicated.

Nevertheless, boundaries remain essential to sustainable relationships because they help us distinguish between what we are willing and able to offer and what exceeds our capacity.

A boundary might involve limiting how much time we spend discussing emotionally difficult subjects, deciding when we’re available to respond to messages, or declining responsibilities we cannot reasonably manage. It might mean acknowledging that we care deeply about someone’s struggles while recognizing that we cannot solve those struggles for them.

Importantly, boundaries are not the same thing as controlling other people. We can communicate what we need and what actions we will take to protect our well-being, but we cannot compel someone else to behave according to our wishes. A boundary concerns our own choices and responses, not our authority over another person’s life.

There is also no requirement that boundaries be inflexible. Our capacity changes, relationships evolve, and circumstances shift. What we can comfortably offer one week may be impossible the next. Being willing to reevaluate our limits doesn’t make those limits meaningless; it makes them responsive to the realities of our lives.

Compassion and boundaries are not competing values. In many circumstances, healthy boundaries make sustained compassion possible.

Attention Is a Resource, Too

Throughout October, we’re exploring Dhāraṇā, the sixth limb of yoga, traditionally associated with concentration and the deliberate focusing of attention. Within Patañjali’s eight-limbed framework, Dhāraṇā concerns holding the mind’s attention upon a chosen point or area.

Although its traditional context is meditative, it also invites us to reflect upon our relationship with attention in everyday life.

Consider how frequently our attention is redirected by external demands. Notifications interrupt conversations. Responsibilities compete for priority. Other people’s needs arrive with varying degrees of urgency, and the expectation of constant accessibility can make it difficult to distinguish between what genuinely requires our immediate attention and what merely demands it.

For many of us, the day becomes a continuous exercise in responding rather than choosing.

This is particularly relevant when we’re discussing boundaries because attention is one of the resources we give away most readily, often without recognizing that we’re doing so. We may carefully consider whether we have the money to make a purchase or the physical energy to complete a task, yet rarely stop to ask whether we have the mental and emotional capacity to engage with another demand.

Bringing the principles of focused attention into our lives off the mat doesn’t mean we should ignore interruptions or expect ourselves to maintain perfect concentration. Nor does it mean that distraction is a personal failing. Attention is influenced by our environments, nervous systems, responsibilities, and individual neurological differences.

Instead, we can cultivate greater awareness of where our attention is going and whether that direction reflects our intentions.

Sometimes that awareness allows us to make a different choice. Sometimes it simply helps us recognize why we’re feeling overwhelmed. Both outcomes have value.

Rest Shouldn’t Require a Permission Slip

Our cultural relationship with rest is, frankly, a mess.

We have become remarkably skilled at treating rest as something that must be justified through productivity. We work until we’re exhausted, then attempt to recover just enough energy to return to work. Even our leisure activities are frequently evaluated according to whether they improve our performance, increase our efficiency, or contribute to some measurable form of personal development.

Rest becomes another tool for maximizing output rather than an essential part of living.

This creates a particularly frustrating contradiction within wellness culture. We’re encouraged to practice self-care, but that care is often framed as a means of becoming more productive, more resilient, or better equipped to continue meeting everyone else’s expectations. At the opposite extreme, self-care is reduced to consumer experiences: expensive products, elaborate routines, and carefully curated moments of relaxation.

Neither approach fully addresses what it means to care for a whole human being.

Meaningful self-care includes physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. It may involve medical treatment, nourishing food, sufficient sleep, supportive relationships, financial planning, therapy, movement, creative expression, or time spent doing something simply because it brings us pleasure. It may also involve recognizing that some of our needs cannot be met through individual effort alone and require community support or broader changes to the conditions in which we live.

And yes, sometimes self-care looks like a bubble bath or a fancy coffee. There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying those things. The problem arises when we mistake pleasant experiences for the entirety of caring for ourselves.

Rest, in particular, deserves to exist independently of our productivity. We do not have to reach the point of physical or emotional collapse before we’re entitled to stop. We do not have to complete every responsibility before we’re allowed to enjoy ourselves. And we certainly do not have to demonstrate that our rest will produce some measurable improvement in our ability to work.

We are human beings, not machines undergoing scheduled maintenance.

Tending Your HeartFire in Real Life

Understanding these ideas intellectually is one thing. Applying them when we’re juggling work, relationships, family obligations, health concerns, and everything else life throws at us is considerably more complicated.

That’s why I prefer to approach HeartFire practices as invitations to examine our circumstances rather than another collection of obligations we’re supposed to perform perfectly.

This week, consider taking a little time to reflect on what currently nourishes your HeartFire and what draws heavily upon it.

The things that nourish us aren’t always grand or transformative. Sometimes they’re familiar routines, meaningful conversations, favorite music, creative hobbies, or moments of connection with the natural world. Sometimes they’re opportunities to participate in work we genuinely care about, even when that work requires effort.

Likewise, the things that drain us aren’t necessarily negative or avoidable. Caring for a loved one can be both meaningful and exhausting. Advocating for an important cause can provide purpose while demanding considerable emotional energy. Living with chronic illness, disability, or financial insecurity can consume resources before we’ve even begun addressing the rest of our responsibilities.

The goal isn’t to divide our lives into things that give us energy and things that take it away, then eliminate everything in the second category. That would be unrealistic, and it would overlook the complexity of meaningful human relationships and commitments.

Instead, we’re looking for a more honest understanding of our capacity.

Perhaps that understanding reveals an area where we need additional support. Perhaps it encourages us to reconsider an expectation we’ve accepted without questioning. Perhaps it helps us recognize that we’ve been treating something genuinely nourishing as an unnecessary luxury.

Or perhaps it simply reminds us that we’re carrying a great deal, and that our exhaustion deserves compassion rather than criticism.

From there, we can consider whether one small, realistic adjustment might help us care for ourselves more effectively. That adjustment could involve setting a boundary, requesting assistance, protecting time for rest, or making room for an activity that brings us joy.

And if our circumstances don’t currently allow us to make those changes, that doesn’t mean we’ve failed. Not every problem can be solved through individual choices, and recognizing our needs remains worthwhile even when meeting them requires time, resources, or support we don’t yet have.

Your Fire Belongs to You

At the heart of this conversation is a deceptively simple principle: our value does not depend upon how much of ourselves we give away.

We can be compassionate without being endlessly available. We can be generous without ignoring our own needs. We can remain committed to our communities and the people we love while acknowledging that our resources are finite.

There will be seasons when we have the capacity to offer tremendous warmth and support. There will be seasons when we need others to offer that warmth to us. And there will be seasons when our primary responsibility is simply protecting the small amount of energy we have available.

None of those seasons makes us more or less deserving of care.

HeartFire isn’t about maintaining an impressive flame for everyone else to admire. It’s about cultivating a relationship with ourselves that recognizes our passions, our limitations, our responsibilities, and our humanity.

We deserve lives in which compassion includes the person offering it.

We deserve relationships in which care can move in more than one direction.

And we deserve the freedom to tend our own fire without feeling obligated to turn ourselves into fuel for everyone else’s.

Your HeartFire is not a public utility. It belongs to you, and you deserve its warmth, too.

Stay curious, stay magickal, and keep the HeartFire burning.

Namaste, Witchlings. 🔮💜

There is a peculiar discomfort that can accompany the absence of a crisis. Everything appears to be going reasonably well, responsibilities are manageable, and nobody is demanding an immediate response. Yet instead of experiencing relief, we find ourselves wondering what might be about to go wrong.

We check our phones, mentally review our responsibilities, or revisit conversations in search of something we might have missed. The quiet feels less like an opportunity to relax and more like an interruption in a pattern we’ve come to expect.

For people who have spent significant portions of their lives navigating unpredictable circumstances, this response may be familiar. When uncertainty has been a persistent feature of our environment, anticipating problems can become an important survival skill. We learn to recognize subtle changes, identify potential risks, and prepare ourselves to respond before a situation becomes unmanageable.

Those skills may have served us well. The difficulty arises when the circumstances that required them begin to change, but our expectations remain organized around the possibility of another crisis.

Peace can feel unfamiliar when vigilance has become our normal way of moving through the world. And unfamiliarity, even when it accompanies something positive, doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable.

When Vigilance Becomes Familiar

Human beings are remarkably adaptable. Repeated experiences shape the way we interpret our surroundings, anticipate consequences, and decide where to direct our attention.

Sometimes the habits we develop are practical responses to difficult circumstances. We maintain emergency supplies because we’ve experienced situations in which they were necessary. We keep important documents organized because we’ve learned how stressful it can be to locate them during an unexpected event. We create contingency plans because experience has taught us that circumstances don’t always unfold as expected.

Preparation can be useful, and developing reliable systems for managing uncertainty isn’t inherently unhealthy.

But vigilance can extend beyond practical planning into the way we experience ordinary interactions and environments.

Someone who has spent years navigating unpredictable conflict may become particularly attentive to changes in other people’s expressions, tone of voice, or behavior. A person accustomed to frequent emergencies may find themselves continually reviewing potential problems, even during relatively uneventful periods.

These patterns can develop because anticipating difficulties once offered a degree of protection or control. Recognizing early signs of conflict might have allowed someone to take precautions. Preparing for emergencies might have reduced the consequences of unexpected events.

When a strategy has repeatedly helped us navigate difficult circumstances, it makes sense that we would continue relying on it.

The challenge is that familiarity isn’t the same thing as safety.

A pattern can feel natural because we’ve practiced it for years, even when it no longer reflects what our present circumstances require.

Why Understanding Safety Doesn’t Always Mean Feeling Safe

One of the more frustrating aspects of prolonged stress is the difference between what we understand intellectually and what we experience physically or emotionally.

We may recognize that a particular situation has ended, that our current relationships are more supportive, or that the quiet afternoon we’re experiencing doesn’t contain an obvious threat. Nevertheless, we may still notice tension, racing thoughts, heightened sensitivity to ordinary sounds, or an impulse to search for something requiring attention.

These experiences can occur in connection with prolonged stress or trauma, although similar sensations may have other explanations. Not every uncomfortable response to quiet or uncertainty reflects the same underlying process.

What matters here is that intellectual understanding doesn’t always produce an immediate change in how we feel.

Knowing that our circumstances have improved doesn’t necessarily eliminate patterns developed during more difficult periods. We may need time, repeated experiences, appropriate support, or changes in our environment before those patterns begin to shift.

This is one reason well-intentioned advice to simply relax can be so unhelpful.

Relaxation isn’t a switch we can activate through determination. Nor is a sense of safety something we can reliably manufacture by criticizing ourselves for failing to experience it.

When we become frustrated with our own vigilance, we may add another layer of tension to an already uncomfortable situation. Instead of recognizing that our responses have a history, we begin treating them as additional evidence that something is wrong with us.

A more useful approach may begin with acknowledging that our circumstances and our responses don’t always change at the same pace.

We can recognize that an old pattern is still present without assuming it must continue governing our decisions indefinitely.

The Strange Familiarity of Having a Problem to Solve

There is another aspect of prolonged crisis management that deserves attention: solving problems can provide a sense of purpose and direction.

When something goes wrong, our immediate priorities may become remarkably clear. We assess the circumstances, identify available options, and decide what requires attention first. Even when the situation is unpleasant, having a concrete problem to address can create a structure for our thoughts and actions.

For people who have spent years responding to emergencies, that structure can become familiar.

The absence of an immediate problem may therefore introduce a different kind of uncertainty. Instead of responding to an external demand, we have to decide what we actually want to do with our time.

That can be surprisingly difficult when our lives have been organized around other people’s needs or unpredictable circumstances.

Someone accustomed to managing the emotional atmosphere of a household may struggle to recognize that they no longer need to monitor everyone else’s mood. A person who has spent years prioritizing urgent responsibilities may find it difficult to identify their own interests when those responsibilities become less demanding.

The challenge isn’t necessarily that they prefer chaos or want something bad to happen. It may simply be that crisis management has provided a familiar framework for making decisions.

Without that framework, questions that previously received little attention can become more prominent. We may discover that we’re uncertain about our preferences, uncomfortable making choices solely for our own enjoyment, or accustomed to measuring the value of our time through our usefulness to others.

Sometimes we create additional tasks because they genuinely need to be completed. Other times, keeping busy may help us avoid feelings that become more noticeable when our schedules are less demanding.

Understanding that distinction can help us recognize when familiar patterns are continuing to shape our behavior.

It doesn’t require us to criticize ourselves for developing them.

Peace Can Make Room for Difficult Feelings

We often define peace through the absence of conflict, demands, emergencies, or immediate threats. Those absences can be valuable, especially for people who have spent extended periods navigating difficult circumstances.

But the removal of external pressure doesn’t automatically resolve everything we experienced while that pressure was present.

Sometimes quieter circumstances give us enough space to recognize exhaustion we’ve been ignoring. Grief that received little attention during a crisis may become more noticeable once our immediate responsibilities have eased. We may begin examining relationships, routines, or priorities that were previously overshadowed by more urgent concerns.

Even ordinary questions about what we enjoy or how we want to spend our time can feel unexpectedly complicated when we’ve had limited opportunities to consider them.

This doesn’t mean peace is harmful or that we’re incapable of appreciating improved circumstances. It means the effects of prolonged difficulty don’t necessarily disappear when the immediate situation changes.

A quieter life may create opportunities to acknowledge experiences we previously had little capacity to process.

That acknowledgment can be uncomfortable, particularly when we expected improved circumstances to produce immediate happiness or relief.

The discomfort doesn’t invalidate the improvement. Nor does it mean we’ve failed to appreciate what we now have.

It simply reflects the complexity of adapting to a different way of living.

Gratitude Doesn’t Require Emotional Simplicity

There can be considerable pressure to respond positively when our circumstances improve.

People may remind us that we’re fortunate, encourage us to focus on what has changed for the better, or point out that things could have been worse. Often these comments come from genuine care and a desire to help us recognize the progress we’ve made.

But gratitude becomes another burden when it’s treated as an obligation to suppress complicated emotions.

We can appreciate a peaceful home while occasionally feeling anxious within it. We can value supportive relationships while continuing to experience difficulties with trust. We can recognize that our lives have become more stable while grieving what happened during less stable periods.

Those experiences can coexist.

The ability to recognize something good doesn’t require us to deny everything difficult associated with it.

This distinction matters because healing and adaptation rarely unfold in a predictable sequence. We may experience meaningful progress in one area while continuing to struggle in another. We may feel increasingly comfortable in our circumstances but still encounter particular situations that bring old responses to the surface.

Expecting ourselves to respond with uninterrupted gratitude can make those experiences harder to navigate. Instead of recognizing that our emotional lives are complex, we may begin judging ourselves for failing to appreciate our circumstances correctly.

There is no requirement that improvement must feel uncomplicated.

And there is no contradiction in being grateful for the present while acknowledging the effects of the past.

Developing a Different Relationship With Ordinary Safety

Learning to experience peace more comfortably doesn’t necessarily require elaborate practices or a deliberate effort to achieve serenity.

In fact, approaches that emphasize prolonged stillness, intense attention to bodily sensations, or particular breathing patterns aren’t appropriate or comfortable for everyone. Some people find them helpful, while others experience increased distress.

There is no universal method for developing a sense of safety, and we should be cautious about treating any single practice as a solution for everyone.

For some people, a useful starting point may be recognizing ordinary moments when nothing requires an immediate response.

That might happen while enjoying a cup of coffee, spending time with someone who doesn’t expect us to manage their emotions, or finishing a responsibility and recognizing that the next task can reasonably wait.

These moments don’t need to become formal mindfulness exercises. We don’t have to close our eyes, alter our breathing, or produce a particular emotional state.

We can simply recognize that the present circumstances don’t require the same response we may have needed in the past.

If that recognition feels uncomfortable, the discomfort can also be acknowledged without turning it into a failure.

Over time, experiences of predictability, supportive relationships, and appropriate boundaries may help us develop a more accurate understanding of what different situations require.

Sometimes caution is warranted. Sometimes action is necessary. And sometimes we have the opportunity to direct our attention toward something other than preventing the next disaster.

The goal isn’t to eliminate every protective instinct. It’s to develop enough flexibility that those instincts don’t automatically determine how we experience every moment.

Safety Must Be More Than an Internal Feeling

Any discussion of learning to feel safer must acknowledge that safety isn’t solely a matter of perception.

Our environments, relationships, resources, and social circumstances all influence whether we’re actually safe.

Someone living in an abusive relationship, an unstable housing situation, or another genuinely threatening environment may have very good reasons to remain vigilant. Their concern may reflect real conditions rather than an outdated response.

Encouraging that person to relax without addressing the circumstances creating the danger would be both ineffective and potentially harmful.

The distinction between recognizing safety and tolerating harm is essential.

People experiencing persistent hypervigilance, trauma-related symptoms, or significant anxiety may benefit from working with qualified mental health professionals who understand their circumstances and respect their individual needs. Appropriate support can include developing strategies for managing overwhelming situations, recognizing patterns, establishing boundaries, and addressing the effects of past experiences.

For others, the most urgent need may be practical assistance in changing circumstances that remain unsafe.

Neither situation should be reduced to a failure of personal resilience.

We cannot reasonably expect people to feel safe simply because we believe they should. Nor can we treat the ability to tolerate distress as evidence that the conditions producing it are acceptable.

A meaningful sense of safety is supported by more than positive thinking. It depends, in part, on having environments and relationships in which our well-being is respected.

Making Room for a Life Beyond Constant Vigilance

Much of our cultural understanding of strength focuses on the ability to respond effectively when things go wrong. We admire people who remain composed during emergencies, make difficult decisions under pressure, and find ways to continue when circumstances become challenging.

Those abilities can be valuable.

But strength also includes the capacity to recognize when the circumstances that required those responses have changed.

We can develop relationships in which we don’t need to monitor every shift in another person’s mood. We can create routines that provide stability without becoming punitive. We can learn to recognize that not every period of silence signals conflict and not every unexpected change requires us to prepare for disaster.

These changes may happen gradually, and they may not follow a predictable path. Familiar patterns can remain present even as we develop different ways of responding to them.

That doesn’t mean our efforts have failed.

The strategies we developed during difficult circumstances may have helped us survive, and we don’t need to reject or condemn them to recognize that they aren’t always necessary now.

We can appreciate our ability to navigate crises while deliberately creating lives that require less constant crisis management.

We can remain capable of responding to genuine problems without devoting every peaceful moment to anticipating them.

And we can recognize that learning to live with greater ease is not a test of strength that we must pass.

Reflection

It may be worth considering how you respond when your circumstances are relatively calm. Are you able to recognize those moments, or do you find yourself searching for the next responsibility or potential problem?

You might also examine which habits helped you navigate difficult experiences and whether those habits continue serving you in the same ways today. Some may remain useful, while others may be limiting choices that weren’t available to you before.

Finally, consider what genuine safety means in your life beyond the absence of an immediate crisis. Supportive relationships, predictable environments, accessible resources, and the freedom to make choices without fear may all contribute to that understanding.

None of these reflections requires you to force yourself into comfort or criticize yourself for finding peace unfamiliar.

Our relationship with safety can change slowly, unevenly, and in ways that don’t always match our expectations.

We deserve more than the ability to survive difficult circumstances. We deserve opportunities to build lives in which survival is no longer the central demand.

Platform: Substack — Membership Exclusive
Publication: Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Week Three Theme: Strength Without Strain

The Virtue of Difficulty: Why We Distrust What Comes Easily

We’ve developed a peculiar relationship with difficulty. Somewhere along the way, our culture became so enthusiastic about celebrating hard work, sacrifice, and perseverance that we began treating the amount of suffering involved in an accomplishment as evidence of its value.

We admire people who push themselves beyond reasonable limits, praise those who succeed despite extraordinary obstacles, and repeat stories about determination as though the greatest achievements must necessarily come at the greatest personal cost. There’s something appealing about these narratives, particularly when they remind us that difficult circumstances don’t always prevent meaningful accomplishments.

But the stories we celebrate also shape our expectations. When hardship becomes an essential ingredient in our understanding of success, we may begin questioning the legitimacy of accomplishments that don’t involve a sufficiently impressive struggle.

Someone who completes a task using an accommodation may find their achievement treated as less meaningful. A person who develops an efficient method for accomplishing something may be accused of taking shortcuts. Someone who prioritizes stability and contentment over relentless ambition may be told they’re wasting their potential.

The underlying assumption is remarkably consistent: if something came easily, perhaps it wasn’t really earned.

That belief deserves considerably more scrutiny than we typically give it.

The Difference Between Effort and Suffering

Hard work can be meaningful. Learning a difficult skill, developing competence, and persisting through challenges may require considerable time, concentration, and determination. Those experiences can contribute to personal growth, and there’s nothing wrong with appreciating the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing something demanding.

The problem begins when we treat effort and suffering as interchangeable.

Some activities are difficult because they require us to develop abilities we haven’t yet acquired. Learning an unfamiliar language, mastering a musical instrument, or developing a complex professional skill may involve frustration and sustained practice. The difficulty is connected to the process of acquiring knowledge or competence.

Other activities become difficult because the circumstances surrounding them are poorly designed, inadequately supported, or unnecessarily restrictive.

A student may struggle to access educational materials because they’re presented in an inaccessible format. An employee may spend substantial energy navigating a workplace that doesn’t accommodate their disability. A caregiver may experience chronic exhaustion because the responsibilities assigned to them exceed what one person can reasonably manage.

In these situations, the difficulty isn’t necessarily contributing to learning or development. It may simply be consuming resources that could have been directed toward the actual purpose of the activity.

Yet our cultural admiration for hard work frequently fails to distinguish between these experiences. We repeat the familiar claim that hardship builds character without examining whether the hardship in question serves any constructive purpose.

Sometimes sustained effort develops knowledge, confidence, and competence. Sometimes prolonged difficulty produces exhaustion, injury, resentment, and burnout. The outcome depends on the circumstances, the resources available, and whether the effort contributes meaningfully to what we’re trying to accomplish.

Difficulty alone tells us remarkably little about value.

When Hardship Becomes a Moral Standard

One of the more troubling consequences of equating difficulty with worth is how quickly our judgments about effort become judgments about character.

We don’t merely acknowledge that someone completed a demanding task; we describe their success as something they’ve earned through sacrifice. When another person accomplishes something similar with assistance or fewer obstacles, we may question whether they deserve the same recognition.

This tendency is especially apparent in discussions about disability and accessibility.

Consider a student who uses an accommodation to access educational material. The accommodation may change how the student receives information or demonstrates their understanding, but it doesn’t automatically eliminate the intellectual work involved. If the purpose of an assignment is to evaluate comprehension, an inaccessible format may introduce an obstacle unrelated to the skill being assessed.

Likewise, a person who uses a mobility aid isn’t somehow participating less legitimately in daily life because the aid makes movement more accessible. The purpose of the tool is to support participation, not to provide an unfair advantage in a competition to determine who can tolerate the greatest amount of physical difficulty.

Yet people who struggle without assistance are often praised for their determination, while those who use available supports may feel compelled to justify their choices.

This reveals something uncomfortable about our assumptions. We may claim to value learning, participation, and achievement while quietly treating the ability to overcome preventable barriers as an additional measure of worthiness.

If the purpose of an activity is learning, inaccessible formatting shouldn’t become an unofficial test of character. If the goal is meaningful participation, navigating avoidable obstacles shouldn’t be a prerequisite for respect.

And if someone discovers a more effective way to accomplish something worthwhile, efficiency shouldn’t automatically be interpreted as a moral compromise.

We have become so accustomed to associating hardship with legitimacy that we sometimes overlook whether the hardship contributes anything useful to the outcome.

The Stories We Choose to Celebrate

Stories of perseverance can offer genuine hope. They remind us that circumstances can change and that people sometimes discover unexpected capabilities while navigating difficult experiences.

But there’s an important difference between honoring someone’s perseverance and romanticizing the circumstances that required it.

A person who survives hardship may deserve admiration for their resourcefulness, determination, or courage. That doesn’t mean the hardship was necessary for their growth, nor does it establish that other people should experience similar difficulties to become equally deserving of respect.

When we romanticize struggle, we risk becoming less willing to address the conditions that make struggle unavoidable.

If hardship is inherently character-building, removing unnecessary obstacles may begin to seem like depriving people of an opportunity to develop resilience. If overcoming barriers demonstrates worthiness, making an environment more accessible can appear to diminish the accomplishments of those who previously navigated it without assistance.

That reasoning creates a deeply flawed relationship between human dignity and suffering.

The fact that someone successfully overcame an obstacle doesn’t establish that the obstacle should continue existing.

We can appreciate the ingenuity required to navigate an inaccessible system while working to make that system more accessible. We can recognize the determination of someone who succeeds under unreasonable conditions without suggesting that those conditions are desirable.

There is no shortage of meaningful challenges in human life. We don’t need to manufacture additional suffering to make accomplishments worthwhile.

What Yoga Offers Us Instead

One of the things I appreciate about yoga is that it offers a different framework for understanding the relationship between effort and ease.

In the Yoga Sūtras, Patañjali describes posture through the qualities of sthira and sukha, commonly understood as steadiness and ease. The pairing is particularly interesting because these qualities aren’t presented as opposites.

Steadiness doesn’t require rigidity, and ease doesn’t mean disengagement. Together, they invite us to explore a practice in which effort and comfort can coexist without one diminishing the other.

This doesn’t mean every posture should feel effortless or that meaningful practice never involves challenge. Developing stability, coordination, and awareness may require concentration and sustained effort.

But the presence of strain isn’t necessarily evidence that we’re practicing more effectively.

If I force myself into a position that causes pain because I believe a deeper expression is more advanced, I may be prioritizing appearance over awareness. If I refuse to use a prop because I think accepting support makes my practice less legitimate, I’m allowing an assumption about worthiness to interfere with what my body actually needs.

And if I evaluate my progress primarily through how much discomfort I can tolerate, I may be overlooking the purpose of the practice altogether.

Yoga isn’t supposed to be a performance of how beautifully we can suffer.

For me, its value lies in developing awareness, discernment, and a more meaningful relationship with my body. That includes learning to recognize when effort supports the practice and when additional strain contributes nothing useful.

The same distinction applies well beyond the mat.

We can approach our responsibilities, relationships, and personal goals with dedication while remaining attentive to whether the methods we’re using are sustainable. We can appreciate meaningful challenges without assuming that greater difficulty always produces greater value.

Sometimes the wiser choice is to work harder. Sometimes it’s to change how we’re working.

And sometimes it’s to recognize that the obstacle we’ve been struggling against doesn’t need to be there at all.

Why Ease Can Feel Undeserved

Even when we understand intellectually that unnecessary suffering isn’t valuable, we may still feel uncomfortable when something becomes easier.

Someone who has spent years struggling with a particular responsibility may finally discover a routine or tool that makes it manageable, only to experience an unexpected sense of guilt. A person whose circumstances have become more stable may find themselves questioning whether they’re doing enough, even when their responsibilities are being met.

These reactions can be particularly familiar to people who have spent extended periods navigating difficult or unpredictable circumstances.

When struggle becomes a consistent feature of daily life, it can shape our expectations about what responsible living is supposed to feel like. We may become accustomed to measuring our dedication through exhaustion or interpreting the absence of difficulty as evidence that we’ve overlooked something important.

In that context, ease can feel suspicious rather than welcome.

We may find ourselves searching for additional responsibilities, creating unnecessary challenges, or feeling uncomfortable when a task no longer requires the effort it once did.

This doesn’t mean we secretly enjoy suffering. It may simply mean that our expectations have been shaped by experiences in which difficulty was unavoidable.

Changing those expectations can require time and conscious examination, particularly when the belief that worthwhile accomplishments must be difficult has been reinforced throughout our lives.

We may need to reconsider not only how we approach challenges but also how we evaluate ourselves when those challenges become more manageable.

An accomplishment doesn’t become less legitimate because we’ve developed the skills to complete it more efficiently. Nor does a responsibility become less meaningful because we’ve found a way to fulfill it without exhausting ourselves.

Sometimes ease is evidence of competence, preparation, or improved circumstances.

Sometimes it’s the result of having access to tools and resources that should have been available all along.

And sometimes it’s simply ease, which doesn’t require a moral justification.

Discernment Matters More Than Difficulty

Rejecting the glorification of suffering doesn’t mean treating every uncomfortable experience as something to avoid.

Some meaningful choices are difficult. Learning unfamiliar skills can be frustrating, changing established habits may require sustained effort, and honest conversations can involve emotional discomfort.

There are circumstances in which continuing through a challenge is worthwhile, even when the process isn’t particularly enjoyable.

But difficulty should invite examination rather than automatic admiration.

We can consider whether the effort contributes to something we genuinely value, whether the discomfort is manageable or harmful, and whether a different approach might be more effective.

We can also examine whether we’re continuing because the goal matters or because we’ve become attached to proving that we’re capable of enduring the struggle.

That distinction requires discernment.

It’s easy to repeat the instruction to push harder. It’s considerably more complicated to evaluate whether pushing harder is appropriate.

The same activity can represent meaningful effort under one set of circumstances and unnecessary strain under another. A demanding project may feel engaging and worthwhile when we have adequate time, support, and energy. Under conditions of exhaustion, unreasonable deadlines, or insufficient resources, that same project may become harmful.

The nature of the task hasn’t necessarily changed. The conditions under which we’re attempting it have.

Acknowledging those conditions doesn’t make us less dedicated. It allows us to make better-informed decisions about how to proceed.

Choosing Ease Without Apology

Our relationship with difficulty influences more than our individual choices. It also shapes the expectations we place on other people and the systems we consider acceptable.

When we treat struggle as evidence of worthiness, we become more willing to tolerate unnecessary barriers. We may resist accommodations because they appear to make participation too easy, or dismiss efficient solutions because they don’t resemble the methods we’ve been taught to respect.

A more useful approach would evaluate effort according to its purpose rather than its capacity to produce suffering.

That doesn’t mean ignoring fairness or pretending everyone has equal access to resources. Quite the opposite. Recognizing the value of accessibility and efficiency should encourage us to examine why some people have access to tools and support that others are denied.

The goal isn’t to create a world in which nobody ever encounters difficulty. It’s to distinguish between challenges that serve meaningful purposes and barriers that unnecessarily restrict participation.

We can value the discipline involved in learning a skill without insisting that everyone learn it through the same methods. We can respect perseverance without requiring people to reject assistance. And we can recognize the importance of sustained effort without treating exhaustion as proof of commitment.

There is considerable wisdom in knowing when a different approach would be more effective.

There is also strength in accepting support, particularly when we’ve spent years believing that independence requires us to manage everything alone.

Choosing the easier path doesn’t necessarily mean choosing the less meaningful one. Sometimes it means recognizing that our time, energy, and well-being are resources worth protecting.

The purpose of our efforts should matter more than the amount of suffering we’re willing to tolerate while pursuing them.

Reflection

It may be worth examining the situations in which we’ve continued using a difficult approach primarily because it feels more legitimate. Sometimes we remain attached to familiar methods because we’ve invested considerable effort in mastering them, even when better alternatives have become available.

We might also consider the tools, accommodations, or sources of support we’ve resisted because using them feels like cheating. That discomfort can reveal assumptions about independence, competence, and worthiness that deserve closer examination.

Perhaps most importantly, we can reconsider how we measure the value of our accomplishments. If we stopped using suffering as evidence that we’ve earned something, we might discover that our efforts can be evaluated through their purpose, their outcomes, and the meaning they hold in our lives.

There’s no need to transform our entire relationship with effort overnight. Recognizing when difficulty has become a measure of worth is a useful beginning.

Our accomplishments don’t become less meaningful when we stop making ourselves miserable to achieve them. And our lives don’t become less valuable when we allow ourselves more ease.

They remember what you wore, what you believed, what made you laugh, how you behaved when you were angry, what you tolerated, what you wanted, what you were afraid of, and the things you did before you knew what you know now. They may remember a version of you that feels so distant from your current life that hearing them describe you would feel like listening to a story about somebody else.

They might also be right.

At least about some of it.

That’s one of the uncomfortable realities of changing: we get to change ourselves, but we don’t get to retroactively update ourselves in everybody else’s memory.

I can do years of work on myself and still be somebody’s story about the person I was before I did it. I can change my beliefs and remain the person who once argued passionately for something I no longer believe. I can learn to communicate differently and still be remembered by somebody I hurt when I didn’t know how. I can develop boundaries and remain, in somebody else’s memory, the person who once had none.

That can feel deeply unfair, especially when we have worked very hard to become someone different.

It can also simply be true.

I think one of the subtler temptations that comes with personal growth is wanting everybody else to revise their story about us at the same speed we’ve revised our story about ourselves. Once we’ve understood why we behaved a certain way, apologized, changed the behavior, or become someone we like better, we want the record updated.

Sometimes people do update it.

Sometimes they don’t.

And we don’t actually get to control that.

We Are Supporting Characters in Other People’s Lives

I am the main character in my own life in the most literal, non-influencer sense possible: I’m the only person who has been present for the entire thing.

I know what happened inside my head. I know the context behind decisions that looked incomprehensible from the outside. I know what I was afraid of, what I didn’t know yet, what I thought I was protecting, and which choices I regret. I have access to information about myself that nobody else has.

That gives me an enormously detailed version of my own story.

It does not make my version the only one.

Everybody who encounters me experiences me from their own perspective. They have information I don’t have, too. They know how something I said landed when I was busy thinking about what I intended. They know what it was like to depend on me, argue with me, love me, work with me, live with me, or be disappointed by me.

I may be a major character in somebody else’s story.

I may be a minor one.

I may be the weird woman they met once at an event who said something that stuck with them for twelve years.

I may be somebody’s villain.

I may be somebody’s safe person.

I may be both, depending on who is telling the story.

That’s uncomfortable as hell.

We naturally want the people who remember us to remember us accurately, but “accurately” often means in a way that includes all the context I have about myself.

They can’t.

They weren’t inside me.

And I wasn’t inside them.

Explanation Doesn’t Rewrite Experience

This becomes especially difficult when we understand ourselves better than we did when something happened.

Maybe we finally understand why we reacted the way we did. Maybe we recognize a survival response, a family pattern, a communication problem, or an unmet need. Maybe we can look back at a conflict and see exactly what was happening inside us.

That understanding matters.

It can help us change.

It can help us forgive ourselves.

It can help us make amends.

What it can’t do is reach backward and change somebody else’s experience of what happened.

There is a difference between saying, “I understand why I did that,” and saying, “Therefore you shouldn’t have been hurt by it.”

The first is self-knowledge.

The second asks somebody else to surrender their experience so our current identity feels more comfortable.

I don’t want to do that.

If I am becoming someone more accountable, then part of that accountability has to include allowing other people to remember the version of me who wasn’t there yet.

That doesn’t mean I have to agree with every story told about me. People misunderstand each other. Memories are imperfect. Some people distort events. Some deliberately lie. Some interpret everything through their own wounds, biases, loyalties, and assumptions.

Other people’s versions of us aren’t automatically objective truth simply because they’re external.

But neither is ours.

We’re all unreliable narrators with varying levels of self-awareness.

What a delightful species.

Sometimes You Are the Villain in a Story You Cannot Fix

This may be one of the hardest things to accept.

Sometimes someone has a story about us where we did harm, and there is no action available that will turn us into the good guy.

Maybe we apologized and they didn’t accept it.

Maybe they don’t want contact.

Maybe enough time has passed that reaching out would serve us more than them.

Maybe the relationship ended.

Maybe there is no appropriate path to repair.

Maybe we’ve done everything we reasonably can and they still think we’re an asshole.

They are allowed.

An apology isn’t a purchase. We don’t insert remorse and receive forgiveness from the machine.

Changing doesn’t create an obligation for everybody harmed by the old version of us to participate in the new one’s redemption arc.

That’s rough on the ego, particularly if being perceived as a good person matters to us.

I think there’s a difference, though, between wanting to be accountable and wanting to be perceived as innocent.

Accountability asks what happened, what our part was, what repair is possible, and what needs to change.

Innocence asks how quickly we can get everyone to agree that we’re still a good person.

Those goals can lead to very different behavior.

Sometimes the work is not getting ourselves recast in somebody else’s story.

Sometimes the work is making sure we don’t keep creating the same story with new people.

And Sometimes Someone Is Remembering a Person You’ve Outgrown

There’s another side to this that isn’t about harm.

Sometimes people simply prefer the old version of us.

They remember when we were more available, more agreeable, more ambitious, more social, more willing to participate, more willing to stay quiet, or more interested in the things that connected us to them.

They may tell stories about that person with genuine affection.

“You used to love doing that.”

“You were always the one who…”

“Remember when you wanted…”

“You never minded before.”

They may be completely correct.

The answer can still be, “Yes. I was like that then.”

We don’t need to correct every old story by insisting that the person they’re remembering never existed. Sometimes our discomfort with somebody else’s memory comes from our own difficulty accepting that we really have changed.

I think there’s a temptation, particularly when an old identity embarrasses us, to retroactively distance ourselves from it.

That wasn’t the real me.

Sometimes that’s meaningful language. There are situations where people have had to perform identities under coercion, danger, masking, or circumstances that gave them very little freedom to discover what felt authentic.

But sometimes the old person was real.

So is this one.

We don’t need to declare one counterfeit to validate the other.

You Can Let Them Have Their Version

There is a surprising amount of peace in realizing that we don’t have to manage every interpretation of us.

Not every misunderstanding requires a defense brief.

Not every old story needs an annotation.

Not everybody needs access to the updated edition.

There are people who haven’t been part of my life for years. Whatever version of me exists in their memory may remain frozen there indefinitely. They don’t know what I’ve learned since. They don’t know what I regret, what I’ve changed, what matters to me now, or what Current Me would do differently.

That’s okay.

They aren’t actually in a relationship with Current Me.

They’re remembering somebody.

And I don’t need to break into their mental library at three in the morning and replace the book.

There are also people who are in our lives and deserve updated information. Those relationships require conversation. If someone I love keeps responding to a version of me that no longer exists, I can tell them. I can ask them to learn me again.

But even then, I can’t dictate their interpretation.

I can offer information.

I can clarify.

I can behave differently long enough for the new pattern to become visible.

I can’t control the story they construct from it.

The Goal Isn’t to Become Uncriticizable

I think this is where a lot of identity work can go sideways.

We don’t just want to become healthier. We want to become a version of ourselves whose history finally makes perfect sense, whose motives are always understandable, whose mistakes have all been properly contextualized, and whom nobody reasonable could possibly dislike.

That person does not exist.

If they did, they’d probably be insufferable.

Being a person means being interpreted. Sometimes fairly. Sometimes unfairly. Usually through a mixture of another person’s experience, our behavior, their history, our history, memory, context, and whatever emotional weather was happening at the time.

We can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control that interpretation.

Or we can put more of that energy into becoming someone whose current behavior we are willing to stand behind.

That doesn’t erase the old stories.

It creates new evidence.

Maybe that’s enough.

You Are Not Required to Haunt Your Own Life

There’s a difference between remembering who we were and allowing that person to govern who we’re permitted to become.

If somebody else still sees Old Me, I don’t have to climb back into Old Me’s clothes so their memory feels accurate.

I also don’t need to spend my life arguing with the ghost.

I can acknowledge that somebody’s story contains a version of me who was real, or partly real, or real from where they stood. I can take responsibility for what belongs to me. I can reject what doesn’t. I can make repair where repair is appropriate and possible.

Then I have to keep living.

That’s ultimately the part no story about us can replace.

The person somebody remembers is not the person making today’s choices.

Today’s choices belong to us.

At the end of a week spent talking about roles, stories, former selves, and identities that need permission to die, maybe that’s where I want to leave this: we do not have to achieve unanimous agreement about who we are before we’re allowed to change.

Someone may always remember the old version.

Someone may miss them.

Someone may resent them.

Someone may love them.

Someone may never forgive them.

Someone may tell a story about them that makes Current Us want to grab a red pen and start editing.

Let them have their story.

We have one to keep living.

And unlike the stories already written about us, this one still has blank pages. 💜

I don’t know what we’d do without you.

You always know what to do.

You’re so strong.

You’re the one I can count on.

You handle everything.

I knew you’d take care of it.

None of those statements are inherently bad. Being dependable is a good thing. Being competent is useful. Caring for people we love is part of being in relationship with other humans. There is nothing inherently unhealthy about being the person who can walk into a chaotic situation, look around, and start figuring out what needs to happen next.

I happen to be pretty freaking good at that.

But there is a difference between being useful and believing usefulness is the price of admission.

There is a difference between enjoying competence and needing to demonstrate competence before you feel worthy of taking up space.

There is a difference between choosing to help and having absolutely no idea who you are when nobody needs anything from you.

And for a lot of us, those lines get blurry.

Not because we’re foolish.

Because usefulness gets rewarded.

We Like Useful People

Our culture talks constantly about productivity, but productivity isn’t only about jobs.

It creeps into nearly everything.

We optimize mornings.

We track habits.

We monetize hobbies.

We turn rest into “recovery” so it can justify itself by improving tomorrow’s performance.

We count steps while walking.

We measure sleep while sleeping.

We turn reading into goals, meditation into streaks, exercise into data, creative work into content, and hobbies into side hustles.

Even self-care frequently gets sold back to us as maintenance for the machine.

Rest so you can be more productive.

Meditate so you can focus better.

Exercise so you can work longer.

Take a vacation so you can return refreshed and ready to grind.

Apparently even lying on a beach needs a quarterly performance objective.

And then there is care work.

Parenting.

Housework.

Emotional labor.

Remembering birthdays.

Making appointments.

Noticing the toilet paper is running low before anyone else discovers it at an extremely inconvenient moment.

Knowing which kid needs new shoes.

Knowing which prescription needs refilling.

Knowing what food the dog can’t eat.

Knowing whose feelings are hurt even though they said they’re fine.

Knowing that if you don’t do the thing, there is a very real possibility that the thing simply will not happen.

A tremendous amount of human life depends on people doing work that may never appear on a résumé.

When you become good at that work, usefulness can become an identity surprisingly quickly.

People need you.

People appreciate you.

People praise you.

And maybe somewhere along the way, being needed starts feeling suspiciously similar to being loved.

That’s where things can get complicated.

Being Needed Can Feel Safer Than Being Loved

Being needed has rules.

If somebody needs something and you provide it, you understand your place in the relationship.

There’s a problem.

You solve it.

There’s a crisis.

You respond.

Someone is hurting.

You comfort them.

Something needs organizing.

You organize it.

The equation makes sense.

Love is considerably messier.

Love asks us to believe that somebody might want us around even when we aren’t doing anything particularly impressive.

That they might still enjoy us when we’re tired.

That they might still value us when we’re inconvenient.

That we can say no.

That we can need things.

That we can have a bad day.

That we can fail.

That we can disappoint them and still remain worthy of relationship.

That we can sit on the couch in pajama pants eating snacks and contribute absolutely nothing to the advancement of civilization for an entire evening.

Being useful can sometimes feel much safer.

Because usefulness gives us evidence.

Look.

I did the thing.

Therefore I belong here.

But what happens when you can’t do the thing?

Bodies Have an Annoying Habit of Being Bodies

A lot of people can maintain an identity built around usefulness for years because their circumstances allow it.

Then something changes.

Maybe illness arrives.

Maybe disability changes.

Maybe chronic pain changes what a day can hold.

Maybe menopause kicks down the door carrying a flamethrower and absolutely no respect for your previous operating procedures.

Maybe age changes recovery time.

Maybe burnout finally collects the debt you’ve been refinancing for a decade.

Maybe there isn’t one dramatic event at all.

You simply realize that the pace you’ve been maintaining is no longer sustainable.

And suddenly the person who could always handle everything can’t.

Or won’t.

Sometimes won’t is even harder.

Because when your body forces you to stop, at least you have an explanation.

When you decide:

I could probably keep doing this, but I don’t want my entire life to require this much of me anymore,

that can bring up a whole different collection of feelings.

Who am I to say no when technically I could manage?

Who am I to rest before I’m completely depleted?

Who am I to ask someone else to do something I know I could do better?

Who am I to choose the easier option?

Who am I if I’m capable of carrying it and decide not to?

Maybe you’re a person who finally realized that capacity is not consent.

Being capable of doing something does not automatically make it your responsibility.

That’s a difficult lesson when capability has become part of your identity.

The Strong One Has Needs, Too

“The strong one” is one of those roles that can look wonderful from the outside.

Nobody means it as an insult.

They trust you.

They admire you.

They’ve seen what you can survive.

But sometimes the strong person begins disappearing behind the strength.

People stop asking whether you’re okay because, historically, you usually are.

Or at least you look like you are.

You know how to function.

You know how to make the call.

Fill out the form.

Drive to the appointment.

Deal with the emergency.

Make dinner.

Take care of the animal.

Handle the work.

Keep the schedule.

Crack a joke.

Keep going.

And because you can, sometimes nobody notices what it costs.

Including you.

Until one day you can’t keep paying.

Then there’s an identity crisis sitting right beside the exhaustion.

Because if I’m not the person who can handle anything, who the hell am I?

If I’m the one who needs help now, have I become somebody else?

Maybe.

But perhaps the identity that needs to die isn’t strong.

Maybe it’s:

Strength means I never need anything.

Those aren’t the same thing.

The Caretaker Isn’t the Care

This gets especially tangled when caring for other people genuinely matters to you.

I don’t want an individualistic version of wellness where the answer to every difficult relationship is boundaries, blocking, and announcing that nobody is entitled to anything from us ever.

That’s not how community works.

We do owe things to one another.

Not unlimited access.

Not self-destruction.

But care?

Yeah.

I think we owe each other some freaking care.

Communities survive because people show up.

Families function because people do things for each other.

Friendships deepen because sometimes somebody needs more than they can immediately return.

Mutual aid exists because humans have always survived by sharing resources, knowledge, labor, and protection.

The problem isn’t caring.

The problem is when caretaker becomes such a complete identity that receiving care feels like a violation of the role.

When everybody else gets to be complicated, needy humans and you get to be infrastructure.

You are not infrastructure.

You’re a person.

You can be deeply committed to caring for other people and still be someone who requires care.

Those things aren’t opposites.

In healthy community, they’re supposed to rotate.

Sometimes I carry you.

Sometimes you carry me.

Sometimes we both sit on the floor and admit neither of us is carrying shit today, so we’re ordering dinner.

That’s still community.

What Happens When Nobody Needs You Right Now?

That question can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

Imagine, just for a moment, that everybody you care about is okay.

Nobody needs rescuing.

Nobody needs advice.

Nobody has a crisis.

There is no urgent work waiting.

No task you forgot.

No appointment to arrange.

No person whose emotions need managing.

Nothing is on fire.

What do you do?

Not what should you do.

Not what productive project could finally receive your attention.

What do you actually want to do?

Some people know immediately.

Some of us stare into the middle distance like we’ve been asked to explain quantum physics using interpretive dance.

Because desire is a different skill from usefulness.

If you spend enough time asking:

What needs to be done?

you may stop asking:

What do I want?

And wanting can feel frivolous.

Especially when there is always more work somewhere.

There is always somebody suffering.

Always another cause.

Another task.

Another email.

Another load of laundry.

Another way you could be useful.

The work is literally never finished.

If you require the entire world to stop needing things before you’re allowed to exist for your own sake, you are going to be waiting a very long time.

You Are Allowed to Be Delightfully Useless Sometimes

I want to reclaim uselessness a little.

Not permanent disengagement.

Not refusing responsibility.

Not abandoning people who depend on us.

Just the ordinary human experience of doing something that does not need to justify the resources it consumes.

Make art nobody sees.

Sing badly.

Read a trashy book.

Play a game.

Watch the birds.

Learn something that will never make you money.

Take a nap that isn’t optimizing anything.

Spend forty-five minutes looking at pictures of animals.

Bake something unnecessarily complicated because you want to know if you can.

Sit outside.

Watch a movie you’ve already seen twelve times.

Have a conversation that accomplishes nothing.

Be ridiculous.

Be curious.

Be bored.

Be alive.

There is something almost rebellious about refusing to turn every part of yourself into output.

Especially if you have spent years believing your output is what makes you valuable.

Maybe Usefulness Is Something You Do

This week, we’re talking about letting identities die.

I don’t want usefulness itself to die.

I like being useful.

I like knowing things.

I like helping.

I like being the person who can say, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”

I like teaching.

I like creating things that help somebody understand themselves or their practice differently.

I’m not interested in becoming useless as a permanent state of being.

But I am interested in moving usefulness out of the center of identity.

Maybe usefulness is something I do.

Not proof of what I’m worth.

Maybe strength is something I have.

Not a contract requiring me to use it every time something heavy appears.

Maybe care is something I give.

Not the rent I pay for belonging.

Maybe productivity is one mode of being alive.

Not the purpose of being alive.

And maybe some identities don’t need dramatic funerals.

Maybe they just need demotions.

The Strong One becomes someone who is strong.

The Caretaker becomes someone who cares.

The Reliable One becomes someone who can be relied upon—and who can occasionally say, “Not today.”

The Useful One becomes a whole human being who is sometimes extraordinarily useful and sometimes wrapped in a blanket doing absolutely nothing of measurable value.

That person is still worthy of love.

Still worthy of community.

Still worthy of care.

Still worthy of rest.

Still worthy of being here.

Your HeartFire is not a pilot light for everybody else’s needs.

It doesn’t exist merely to warm the room for everyone around you.

It belongs to you.

So yes, be useful.

Help people.

Show up.

Care deeply.

Do good work.

Carry something when you have the capacity and choose to carry it.

And sometimes, put the freaking thing down.

You do not have to earn your existence by being the person everyone needs.

Sometimes you are allowed to simply be the person who is here. 🔮💜

Sometimes the accusation is deserved. If I spent years insisting that a particular principle mattered and suddenly abandon it the moment following it becomes inconvenient for me, somebody probably should ask what happened. If I hold other people to standards I refuse to apply to myself, pointing out the inconsistency isn’t an attack on my personal growth. It’s accountability.

But we’ve stretched the idea of consistency far beyond accountability. We use it to judge people for changing their minds, leaving communities, revising beliefs, choosing different careers, adopting new language for themselves, ending relationships, discovering new needs, or admitting that something they once believed about themselves isn’t true anymore.

At some point, consistency stopped meaning that our actions should have some relationship to our stated values and started meaning that a person should remain recognizable forever.

I don’t think those are the same thing.

In fact, if we genuinely value learning, they can’t be the same thing.

Learning is supposed to change us.

That’s the entire freaking point.

If I can encounter new information, listen to people whose experiences differ from mine, discover that something I believed was inaccurate, and still emerge with every opinion exactly where I left it, I’m not sure what I’ve accomplished. I may have consumed information, but I haven’t necessarily learned anything from it.

Yet culturally, we’re strangely suspicious of people who admit they’ve changed their minds. We dig up something somebody said ten years ago and compare it with what they’re saying now as though the contradiction alone settles the question of their character. Sometimes it reveals hypocrisy. Sometimes it reveals opportunism. Sometimes the person owes an explanation or an apology for harm caused by what they previously believed.

Sometimes it reveals that ten years passed.

Context matters.

I care much more about the path between two positions than I do about the fact that the positions differ. If somebody tells me, “I used to believe this, then I learned this, I listened to these people, I examined the effect of what I believed, and I changed my mind,” I don’t consider that evidence that they’re untrustworthy.

Depending on what happened in the middle, it may be evidence that they are capable of growth.

That doesn’t erase the past. Growth is not a time machine. If our previous beliefs harmed somebody, changing those beliefs doesn’t mean the harm disappears. “I know better now” can explain why our behavior changed; it doesn’t automatically repair what happened before it did.

Accountability asks us to own that.

Rigidity asks us never to change in the first place.

Those are profoundly different expectations.

We Confuse Sincerity With Permanence

I think one reason identity change makes people uncomfortable is that we tend to treat permanence as evidence of sincerity.

If you really loved that person, how can you not love them now?

If you really believed that religion, how can you believe something different now?

If that identity was genuinely meaningful to you, how can another word fit better today?

If you truly wanted that career, why did you leave it?

If you were happy there, why aren’t you there anymore?

Underneath those questions is the assumption that something can only have been real if it remains true forever.

That would make an enormous portion of human life fake.

I have wanted things sincerely that I do not want anymore. I have believed things sincerely that I no longer believe. I have belonged in places I later outgrew. I have made choices that were right for the person I was and would be completely wrong for the person I am now.

The later truth does not automatically expose the earlier one as a lie.

Sometimes we really were that person.

Then we changed.

That’s not necessarily evidence that we lacked integrity. Integrity isn’t freezing ourselves at the moment we first make a declaration and refusing to incorporate new information because somebody might accuse us of inconsistency.

Sometimes integrity requires changing.

If I tell you that I value compassion and then discover that one of my beliefs is causing harm I hadn’t understood, which is the more consistent choice: protecting the old belief so nobody can say I’ve changed, or examining whether my actions still align with the value I claimed mattered?

If I say I value truth, I have to leave room for the deeply annoying possibility that I am wrong.

Otherwise I don’t value truth.

I value being right.

Those are also not the same thing.

Identity Can Become a Trap

Once we’ve publicly identified ourselves a certain way, changing can become considerably harder.

There are social consequences. Communities form around identity. Relationships form around it. We may have spent years defending a belief, career, practice, lifestyle, or understanding of ourselves. Other people know us through it. We may have taught it, advocated for it, built a business around it, or corrected other people about it.

Then something changes.

Now we’re not merely deciding whether a thing still fits. We’re deciding whether we’re willing to endure the embarrassment of admitting it doesn’t.

That can keep people attached to identities long after curiosity has started knocking holes in the walls.

There is a particular vulnerability in saying, “I was wrong.”

There is another in saying, “I wasn’t wrong then, but this isn’t right for me now.”

The second can be harder to explain because there isn’t necessarily a villain. Nobody betrayed you. No dramatic revelation occurred. You simply changed enough that something which once fit doesn’t anymore.

We don’t have many cultural scripts for that.

We understand conversion stories. We understand escape stories. We understand the moment somebody realizes the old thing was terrible and discovers the new thing that finally makes everything make sense.

We’re less comfortable with, “It mattered deeply to me, I don’t regret it, and I’m done.”

There’s no villain to blame and no redemption arc to applaud.

Just change.

Consistency With What?

This is where I think the word consistency needs more scrutiny.

Do I want to be consistent with every opinion I’ve ever expressed?

Absolutely not. Some of my former opinions were uninformed. Some were inherited. Some came from environments I no longer inhabit. Some were based on information that has changed. Some were simply wrong.

Do I want to be consistent with every goal I’ve ever announced?

Also no. Past Me does not get to assign Current Me homework indefinitely.

Do I want my identity to remain consistent enough that everybody who met me twenty years ago immediately recognizes the person I am today?

That seems like a deeply strange standard for a life.

What I do want is some consistency between the values I claim and the choices I make.

I want curiosity to matter enough that new information can affect me. I want compassion to matter enough that discovering I’ve caused harm changes my behavior. I want integrity to matter enough that I can admit when something no longer fits rather than continuing to perform it because I’ve already invested too much in the costume.

That kind of consistency can produce a person whose opinions, practices, boundaries, and identities change quite a lot over time.

The through-line isn’t sameness.

It’s the process by which we decide what deserves to change.

Changing Your Mind Isn’t a Get-Out-of-Accountability-Free Card

There is, of course, another side to this.

“I’ve changed” can be used manipulatively.

People can reinvent themselves without repairing harm. They can declare a new era and become angry when anybody remembers the previous one. They can adopt new language while continuing the same behavior underneath it. They can demand immediate trust because they have decided they’re different now.

Other people are not required to experience our transformation on our preferred timeline.

If I hurt someone while being the person I used to be, they are allowed to remember it. They may decide they don’t want a relationship with Current Me, regardless of how much work Current Me has done.

My growth belongs to me.

Their boundaries belong to them.

Letting an identity die doesn’t erase its consequences.

That’s why I don’t want to replace the worship of consistency with the worship of change. Change itself isn’t automatically virtuous. People can change in ways that make them crueler, less curious, less accountable, and more willing to harm others.

The question isn’t whether someone changed.

The question is how and why.

What information did they encounter?

What did they do with it?

Did their values change, or did their understanding of how to live those values change?

Can they explain the path without rewriting their own history?

Can they acknowledge harm without requiring everyone harmed by the old version to applaud the new one?

Can they tolerate being asked about the contradiction?

That last one matters to me.

If my new beliefs can’t withstand questions about how I got here, perhaps I haven’t examined them as thoroughly as I think.

Let People Become New Information

There is a strange thing we sometimes do with people we have known for a long time: we stop gathering information about them.

We already “know” them.

We know what they like. We know what they’ll say. We know what they believe. We know what they’re capable of. We know the role they play.

Then they change, and instead of updating our understanding, we treat the change as an error.

Families do this. Friend groups do it. Workplaces do it. Communities do it.

We do it to ourselves.

But people are not reference books that become unreliable when the newest edition contains revisions.

Sometimes the revision is the most accurate information available.

That doesn’t mean we discard the earlier editions. History matters. Patterns matter. If somebody announces they’ve changed after demonstrating the same harmful behavior seventeen times, skepticism is not cruelty. We are allowed to consider the whole record.

We’re also allowed to notice when the record actually changes.

I think healthy relationships require both memory and revision.

We remember enough not to pretend the past didn’t happen, and we remain curious enough not to force someone to live there forever.

We allow the possibility that the person standing in front of us knows something their former self didn’t.

Including when that person is us.

Maybe consistency isn’t about staying the same.

Maybe it’s about having principles sturdy enough to survive revision.

I don’t need to believe everything I’ve always believed in order to have integrity. I need to be willing to examine why I believe what I believe now. I need to own what I did with the beliefs I carried before. I need to be willing to change again if better information gives me a reason.

There are identities I have worn sincerely that I no longer wear.

There are things I have changed my mind about.

There will almost certainly be more.

I hope so.

Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life defending an outdated version of myself merely so nobody can accuse me of inconsistency.

I’d rather be consistent about learning.

And learning, if we’re actually doing it, is eventually going to change the story. 💜

Get back in shape.

Get your body back.

Get back to your routine.

Get back on track.

Get back to your old energy.

Get back to your practice.

Get back to normal.

The assumption underneath all of those phrases is easy to miss because they’re so common: somewhere behind you is a version of yourself that represents the correct destination.

You were there once.

Something happened.

Now your job is to return.

Sometimes that makes perfect sense.

If I sprain my ankle, I probably want to regain function I had before the injury. If an illness temporarily knocks out my stamina, I may want to rebuild it. Rehabilitation can absolutely involve restoring abilities we’ve lost.

But human beings aren’t reset buttons.

Sometimes something happens and we don’t go back.

We go forward differently.

And I think a wellness culture obsessed with restoration can make that reality much harder to live inside.

Back to Which Body, Exactly?

Whenever somebody talks about “getting their body back,” I want to ask:

Which one?

The body you had at twenty?

Thirty?

Before pregnancy?

Before surgery?

Before disability?

Before menopause?

Before the injury?

Before the medication?

Before the grief?

Before the job that changed your schedule?

Before the five years of life that happened between then and now?

Bodies don’t disappear and get replaced while we’re distracted.

The body you’re living in now is the body that lived through everything between then and now.

It didn’t go anywhere.

It changed.

That’s what living bodies do.

And yet wellness marketing is incredibly good at taking an earlier version of a body and turning it into both a product and a promise.

Remember when you looked like this?

Remember when you had this much energy?

Remember when these clothes fit?

Remember when you could do this?

Buy the program.

Take the class.

Follow the plan.

Commit to the challenge.

Do the work.

We’ll help you get back.

Back becomes a sales pitch.

And nostalgia is extremely marketable.

“Normal” Is Often Just a Date on the Calendar

We do something similar with normal.

I want to feel normal again.

I want my normal life back.

I want my body back to normal.

That’s understandable, especially after something disruptive.

There are times when I desperately miss an earlier baseline.

But normal can become slippery.

Sometimes what we call normal really means:

the last version of my life I understood.

It was familiar.

I knew the rules.

I knew what my body could do.

I knew how much energy I had.

I knew what a day looked like.

Then something changed, and suddenly all the measurements were wrong.

That’s disorienting.

Of course we want familiarity back.

But familiarity and health aren’t always the same thing.

Familiarity and sustainability aren’t always the same thing.

Familiarity and safety aren’t always the same thing.

Sometimes our old normal included things we had become very good at enduring.

Sometimes it included a pace we could technically maintain but shouldn’t have needed to.

Sometimes we don’t realize that until the old normal becomes unavailable.

Yoga Can Become Another Way to Chase the Past

This can happen very quietly on the mat.

You remember what your practice used to look like.

So you begin treating that practice as the destination.

Maybe you once practiced five days a week.

Now you’re trying to get back to five.

Maybe you once practiced vigorous flows.

Now you’re trying to build yourself back up to them.

Maybe you once had a particular range of motion.

Now every practice becomes a measurement of how close you are to recovering it.

Maybe you used to move through class without much

Depending on the context, that can mean a lot of things. Maybe I genuinely used to be more relaxed. Maybe something changed. Maybe I became more anxious, more cautious, or more particular as I got older. Humans do that sometimes.

But “easygoing” can also mean that I used to let something slide.

I didn’t correct you.

I didn’t tell you the joke bothered me.

I didn’t ask for an accommodation.

I didn’t say I was tired.

I didn’t tell you I disagreed.

I didn’t make you deal with the effect your behavior had on me.

I didn’t say no.

From the outside, all of those things can look remarkably peaceful.

That’s what makes some identity changes socially complicated. We don’t develop our sense of self in isolation. Other people interact with the roles we play, and sometimes those roles make their lives easier. When we stop performing them, our growth can feel like a loss to someone else.

That doesn’t automatically make the other person terrible. If someone has known us a certain way for years, it can take time for them to adjust when the relationship changes. There is a difference between needing time to learn a new dynamic and insisting that another person return to a version of themselves that required less from us.

I think that distinction matters.

We live in a culture that praises certain kinds of people for being exceptionally easy to accommodate. Employees who never say no are team players. Women who don’t express anger are pleasant. Disabled people who minimize their access needs are inspiring. People experiencing pain who remain cheerful are brave. Family members who keep showing up regardless of how they’re treated are loyal. Friends who require very little reciprocity are low-maintenance.

These qualities aren’t inherently bad. Generosity is good. Flexibility can be useful. Patience matters. There are plenty of situations where choosing not to make something an issue is exactly what we want to do.

The problem is what happens when a behavior stops being a choice and becomes the admission price for being considered a good person.

Then “easygoing” stops describing a temperament and starts describing compliance.

I think a lot of us discover this only when we begin changing. We set one boundary and suddenly we’re selfish. We ask for one accommodation and become demanding. We object to something we’ve quietly tolerated for years and are accused of creating conflict, as though the conflict began when we finally acknowledged it.

That last one is particularly useful to pay attention to.

The person who names a problem is not necessarily the person who created it.

Sometimes there has been tension in a relationship for years, but one person’s silence made it invisible to everyone except the person absorbing it. Once they stop absorbing it quietly, the discomfort becomes shared. From the perspective of everyone who benefited from the previous arrangement, it can look like the person speaking up brought discomfort into a previously comfortable room.

They did, in a sense.

They just stopped being the only person carrying it.

This is one reason I get suspicious when someone describes another person’s growth primarily in terms of how inconvenient it has become. “Ever since therapy...” “Ever since they started hanging out with...” “Ever since they learned about boundaries...” “Ever since they got diagnosed...” “Ever since they started talking about politics...” “Ever since they came out...”

Sometimes the rest of that sentence contains a legitimate concern. People can absolutely use therapeutic language badly. We can become rigid. We can mistake boundaries for instructions controlling other people’s behavior. We can learn something new and become temporarily insufferable about it. Humans remain humans even while growing.

But sometimes “ever since” simply marks the point where somebody stopped participating in an arrangement that worked beautifully for everyone except them.

That’s a very different story.

It also raises an uncomfortable question about some of the identities we cherish most: How much of what I think of as my personality developed around being acceptable to other people?

That isn’t an accusation. We are social creatures. Of course other people shape us. We learn what earns affection, what creates conflict, what gets us praised, what gets us punished, what makes people stay, and what makes them withdraw. Some of that learning is healthy social development. Some of it is culture. Some is family. Some is survival.

The difficult part is sorting out which pieces still feel like ours when the consequences change.

Maybe I really am generous.

Maybe I also learned that generosity made me harder to reject.

Maybe I genuinely value harmony.

Maybe I also learned to confuse harmony with nobody being upset with me.

Maybe I’m naturally independent.

Maybe I also learned that needing people was dangerous.

Maybe I’m flexible.

Maybe I also learned that asking other people to accommodate me came with consequences I wasn’t willing or able to face.

Two things can be true at once. The presence of adaptation doesn’t make every quality fake.

It does mean we get to examine whether we’re still choosing it.

And sometimes, once we do, we become less convenient.

We start having preferences where we used to say, “Whatever you want.”

We stop answering messages immediately.

We decline invitations.

We ask questions.

We request captions, seating, breaks, quieter rooms, different communication, clearer expectations, or more time.

We tell someone that the nickname they have used for years isn’t funny to us anymore.

We stop laughing when we’re uncomfortable.

We stop volunteering for the task everybody assumes we’ll handle.

We become willing to let somebody be annoyed.

That last one can feel enormous.

For many people, allowing someone else to be disappointed is not a small social adjustment. It can run directly against years of conditioning. If our identity was built around being helpful, pleasant, agreeable, competent, accommodating, or safe for everyone else to be around, another person’s disappointment can feel like evidence that we are failing at being ourselves.

Maybe we’re not.

Maybe the identity itself is changing.

There is grief in that, because being easy to need can create belonging. If everybody knows what you do for the group, you know where you fit. Becoming more complicated may make some relationships more complicated, too. A few may not survive the change.

That doesn’t mean every relationship that struggles with our boundaries was secretly exploitative. Relationships have patterns, and changing one part of a pattern requires adjustment throughout the system. People who love us can stumble while learning us again.

What matters to me is whether there is room for the new information.

Can I tell you that something doesn’t work for me anymore without being punished for changing?

Can you be disappointed without requiring me to fix your disappointment?

Can we renegotiate?

Can you become inconvenient to me, too?

Because that’s the other half of this. I don’t want liberation that only travels in my direction. If I am allowed to change, so are the people I love. If I want room to develop new boundaries, they get room to have boundaries I find inconvenient. If I want my needs treated as real, I have to make space for theirs to be real when accommodating them isn’t effortless for me.

That’s where this stops being a slogan and becomes relationship.

We aren’t trying to build a world where nobody accommodates anybody. We’re trying to build relationships where accommodation, generosity, compromise, and care aren’t permanently assigned according to who learned earliest to disappear.

There is a tremendous difference between choosing to make something easier for someone you love and believing you must remain easy for everyone in order to deserve love.

One is generosity.

The other can become an identity prison with very nice manners.

So yes, sometimes growth makes us more difficult.

We may ask more questions. Need different things. Refuse more often. Become more particular about where our time goes. Stop treating our own discomfort as the cheapest solution available.

Some people will experience that as a change for the worse.

We should listen when people we trust tell us our behavior is hurting them. Changing doesn’t make us infallible, and “this is the new me” is not a magical exemption from accountability.

But neither is somebody else’s discomfort proof that our old identity was healthier.

Sometimes the version of us everyone found easiest to live with was the version doing the most work to make sure nobody else had to be uncomfortable.

That person deserves tenderness.

They may have kept us safe. They may have kept relationships intact. They may have gotten us through situations where being inconvenient carried consequences we could not afford.

We don’t have to hate them.

We just don’t have to keep their job forever.

If Current You takes up a little more room, asks for a little more reciprocity, needs a few more things, says no more often, or has become harder to summarize as “easygoing,” perhaps that’s information worth examining rather than immediately correcting.

You are allowed to become inconvenient.

So is everybody else.

Maybe what we’re actually learning is how to build relationships sturdy enough to hold people who no longer need to disappear to keep them comfortable. 💜

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

I am a survivor of sexual assault.

I am a survivor of military sexual trauma.

Those are facts about my life.

They are not invitations to ask me for the details.

I am choosing to say them publicly because somewhere right now, another survivor is deciding whether what happened to them “counts.” Someone is wondering whether they are the only one. Someone is watching what is happening to Jane Doe and learning, yet again, what can happen when a survivor speaks.

And somewhere, people are trying to take away one survivor’s choice about whether her identity becomes public at all.

No.

She gets to decide.

Every survivor gets to decide.

Speaking about my history does not mean another survivor owes you theirs. My willingness to name what happened to me does not make Jane Doe’s anonymity suspicious. And her choice to remain anonymous does not make her story less deserving of being heard.

I can choose visibility while defending her right to privacy.

Both are survivor autonomy.

I am Jane Doe.

#IAmJaneDoe

People want to know what happened. They want to know how you’re doing. They want updates about funeral arrangements, memorial plans, belongings, ashes, estates, family conflicts, and whether you’ve “heard anything yet.” Some of that curiosity comes from genuine care. People don’t always know what to do when someone they care about is grieving, so they ask questions because questions feel like action.

Some of it is simply human curiosity.

And some of it crosses a line.

Grief has a way of revealing how differently people understand privacy. One person thinks asking how someone died is a perfectly reasonable expression of concern. Another can’t imagine asking something so personal unless the grieving person volunteers it first. Someone thinks posting photographs and memories online is a beautiful tribute; someone else is horrified to discover that a death has been announced publicly before the immediate family has even finished making phone calls.

Then social media enters the situation, and suddenly we’re trying to navigate one of the most intimate human experiences inside systems explicitly designed to make things visible.

I don’t think we’ve entirely figured out what that does to grief.

We have always grieved socially. Funerals, wakes, memorials, mourning clothes, obituary notices, food delivered to the family, religious services, graveside rituals, and community gatherings existed long before anybody could post a black square and a paragraph on Facebook. Public mourning isn’t new.

What is new is the scale, speed, permanence, and audience.

A person can learn that somebody they love died while casually scrolling their phone. A memorial post can reach hundreds or thousands of people before everyone close to the person has been notified. A grieving person’s words can be screenshotted, shared, commented on, interpreted, and preserved indefinitely. The algorithm can resurface a photograph years later with cheerful enthusiasm because it has no idea that the person smiling beside you is dead.

Our tools for sharing have evolved much faster than our etiquette for using them.

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

One of the first questions after a death is often deceptively simple: who gets to tell people?

Before social media, there were still plenty of opportunities for information to travel faster than intended. Families called one another. Friends heard through friends. Workplaces passed information around. Communities talked.

Now one person can tell essentially everyone at once.

That makes the order of communication matter.

If somebody dies, the people closest to them deserve a reasonable opportunity to tell the people who need to hear it directly before the information becomes public. There are few things I can imagine more awful than discovering a loved one’s death because somebody else wanted to be the first person to post a tribute.

The memorial post can wait.

The relationship matters more than engagement.

This is one of those places where I think our online habits sometimes override basic human consideration. We’re accustomed to sharing things as they happen. Something important occurs and our phones are already in our hands. Birthdays, weddings, hospital visits, graduations, accidents, breakups, emergencies—we’ve created a culture where documenting an event can become almost simultaneous with experiencing it.

Death deserves more deliberation than that.

Not because death needs to be hidden, but because information about a death belongs first to the people directly affected by it. There is a difference between sharing grief and announcing someone else’s loss for them.

Grief Doesn’t Require a Press Release

Once the news is public, another expectation can emerge: updates.

People ask how you’re doing, which is kind. Then they ask again. And again. They want to know about the service. They want to know what happened with the ashes. They want to know whether you’ve gone through the belongings. They want to know what the doctor said, what the police said, what the family decided, whether there was a will, whether there was insurance, whether you’re staying in the house, whether you’re going back to work.

Eventually grief can begin to feel like something you’re supposed to provide status reports about.

You don’t have to.

There are circumstances where information genuinely needs to be shared, of course. Families have logistics. Friends need to know when a memorial is happening. Communities sometimes need practical information about how to help.

But nobody is entitled to every detail simply because they care.

That distinction can feel uncomfortable because grief often brings an enormous amount of support from people who sincerely want to help. Setting a boundary with someone who means well can feel rude, especially when we’re already exhausted. We may worry that refusing to answer a question means rejecting the person asking it.

It doesn’t.

“I don’t want to talk about that” is a complete answer.

So is “We’re keeping that private.”

So is changing the subject.

So is not responding until you have the energy.

Grieving people should not have to become public-relations departments for their own losses.

Not Every Story Is Ours to Tell

There is another side of public grief that deserves attention, especially in a culture where storytelling has become such a common way of processing our lives.

Our grief belongs to us.

The dead person’s entire life does not.

Those things overlap, but they aren’t identical.

If someone dies and their death affects me, I am allowed to talk about my experience of that loss. I can talk about what I miss, what I’m feeling, what the relationship meant to me, and how grief is affecting my life.

That doesn’t automatically mean every detail of their life becomes mine to disclose.

The dead still had privacy while they were alive. They had medical histories, relationships, mistakes, identities, conversations, family conflicts, financial circumstances, diagnoses, traumas, and things they chose to share with some people but not others.

Death doesn’t automatically turn all of that into community property.

This becomes particularly complicated when somebody dies under circumstances people are intensely curious about. Sometimes the cause of death itself carries stigma. Sometimes there are details that could affect surviving family members. Sometimes the person was private about something while alive. Sometimes the people closest to them disagree about what should be shared.

There isn’t a universal rule that resolves every situation.

I do think there is a useful question, though: Am I telling my story, or am I exposing theirs?

Sometimes the answer will be both. Relationships don’t separate cleanly enough to avoid that entirely.

But asking the question can change what we choose to share.

Social Media Gives Us an Audience Grief Never Asked For

There can be something genuinely beautiful about grieving online.

People tell stories you never heard. They post photographs you didn’t know existed. Someone you thought of in one context turns out to have mattered deeply to people in ten others. Communities gather around a family. People bring food, send money, share resources, offer rides, cover work shifts, and remind grieving people that they aren’t alone.

For people whose communities are geographically scattered, the internet can make collective mourning possible in ways it wasn’t before.

It can also turn grief into content.

Those two things can look disturbingly similar from the outside.

I don’t think posting about someone who died automatically means someone is exploiting their death. That’s far too simplistic. Human beings have always told stories about our dead. Social media is one of the places we tell stories now.

But the existence of an audience can subtly change how we tell them.

We begin thinking about wording. Photographs. Timing. Whether the post is “good enough.” We watch reactions accumulate. We notice which story gets more engagement. The platforms themselves reward emotionally intense material because emotionally intense material keeps people interacting.

That doesn’t mean someone grieving publicly is performing.

It does mean we’re grieving inside systems built to encourage performance.

That’s worth remembering.

Nobody Owes Us Visible Grief

The flip side is that someone who doesn’t post about a death isn’t necessarily grieving less.

We know this intellectually, but online culture can make absence look meaningful.

Someone hasn’t posted anything about their mother. Someone changed their profile picture back quickly. Someone is sharing memes three days after the funeral. Someone hasn’t mentioned the anniversary. Someone went out with friends. Someone’s Instagram looks completely normal.

None of that tells us what is happening when the phone is put down.

People use social media differently. Some process through writing. Some disappear. Some need distraction. Some share only after they’ve had time to understand what they’re feeling. Some never want their grief online at all.

A public platform shows us what someone decided to make public.

That’s it.

We don’t know what happened before the photograph or after the post. We don’t know whether the person cried for six hours and then shared a stupid meme because their brain desperately needed something else to do. We don’t know whether an anniversary was spent quietly with family. We don’t know whether the person simply doesn’t want one of the most vulnerable parts of their life available for commentary.

Silence is not evidence of indifference.

Public Figures Complicate This Even Further

The boundary between private and public grief becomes particularly strange when the person who dies is well known.

People can grieve someone they’ve never met.

I don’t find that particularly mysterious. A musician can be present during enormous parts of someone’s life without ever knowing their name. An author can put language around something a reader couldn’t articulate. An actor can become associated with childhood, family traditions, or a period when a particular show was a source of comfort. Activists, teachers, spiritual leaders, artists, and public figures can affect millions of people they never personally encounter.

The relationship isn’t reciprocal, but the influence can still be real.

When a public figure dies, thousands or millions of people may experience genuine grief while the person’s family is experiencing something entirely different: the death of someone they actually knew.

Both realities can exist without being equivalent.

Fans are allowed to mourn. Communities are allowed to acknowledge the loss of someone whose work mattered to them. At the same time, public affection doesn’t create personal ownership. Nobody becomes entitled to photographs from the hospital, private family information, the contents of someone’s final conversations, or immediate statements from grieving relatives simply because the person who died had a public career.

A public life does not make every part of a death public property.

We Can Tell Stories Without Claiming Ownership

Maybe that’s the distinction I keep coming back to.

Remembrance and ownership are not the same thing.

We can tell stories about the people who shaped us without pretending their entire lives belong to us. We can speak someone’s name without disclosing everything we know about them. We can celebrate what they gave us while protecting what they trusted us with.

Sometimes devotion looks like telling the story.

Sometimes devotion looks like keeping one.

There are things I share publicly about people I love because those stories are part of my life and I want them remembered. There are other things that belong to relationships rather than audiences. The existence of a platform doesn’t obligate me to collapse that distinction.

I think that’s particularly important during a season when many of us are intentionally talking more about death, ancestors, grief, and remembrance. There can be pressure to produce something visible—to post the altar, photograph the candle, tell the story, name the dead, explain what the ritual means.

You don’t have to.

A private remembrance is still remembrance.

A candle nobody photographs still burns.

A name whispered alone is still spoken.

A story kept within a family or a circle of friends isn’t less meaningful because strangers never hear it.

And grief doesn’t become more legitimate because it has witnesses.

We are living in a time when almost anything can become public within seconds. That makes privacy something we increasingly have to choose rather than something we automatically possess.

The dead deserve some consideration in that choice.

So do the living.

Tell the stories that are yours to tell. Share the memories you want to share. Let community hold you when you want to be held.

But don’t mistake access for entitlement.

Someone’s death can touch an entire community without making every part of their life belong to that community.

Some grief needs witnesses.

Some grief needs a closed door.

Both can be acts of love. 🔮💜

We have ideas about what grief should look like, how intense it should be, how long it should last, which losses deserve the strongest response, and what somebody’s behavior after a death supposedly tells us about the relationship they had with the person who died. Cry too much and someone worries you’re not coping. Cry too little and someone wonders whether you really cared. Start laughing again too soon and it can look disrespectful. Remain visibly devastated for too long and eventually people start wondering why you haven’t moved forward.

Apparently there is an appropriate grief setting somewhere between “concerningly fine” and “making Thanksgiving uncomfortable,” and we’re all expected to locate it without being given the instructions.

The problem is that grief doesn’t work that way because relationships don’t work that way.

Two people can love equally deeply and respond completely differently to loss. One person may cry immediately and often. Another may become extraordinarily practical because somebody has to call the funeral home, feed the dog, locate the paperwork, tell the family, cancel appointments, and figure out why death somehow generates seventeen administrative tasks before you’ve even processed what happened. Someone else may feel numb for weeks before the reality of the loss arrives. Another person may feel almost normal most of the time until a song plays in a grocery store six months later and suddenly they’re standing next to the canned tomatoes trying not to fall apart.

None of those responses gives us a reliable measurement of love.

Grief isn’t a receipt showing how much somebody mattered.

That’s important because we’re remarkably good at turning grief into evidence, particularly when we’re looking at someone else’s. We notice who cried at the funeral. We remember who didn’t attend. We judge how quickly someone returned to work, started dating again, cleared out a closet, laughed at a joke, changed their relationship status, adopted another animal, took off a wedding ring, or posted something cheerful online.

Then we build stories around those observations without knowing what is happening inside the person we’re observing.

Sometimes we even do it to ourselves.

If I loved them enough, shouldn’t I be more upset today? If I’m still hurting this much, does that mean I’m not healing? If I enjoyed myself tonight, am I forgetting them? If I don’t want to keep all their belongings, does that mean they didn’t matter? If I don’t cry on the anniversary this year, have I somehow lost part of the relationship?

We can make grief perform an astonishing number of loyalty tests if we let it.

I don’t think the dead need us to prove our love by suffering correctly.

Different Relationships Create Different Grief

Part of the problem is that we talk about grief as though the primary variable is the fact that someone died. But the relationship itself matters enormously, and relationships can contain almost anything.

The death of someone you spoke to every day is different from the death of someone you loved but hadn’t seen in years. Losing someone suddenly is different from watching an illness progress for a long time. Losing a parent you adored is different from losing a parent who harmed you, although both can be devastating. The death of an estranged family member can reopen questions you thought you’d settled. The death of someone who was suffering may bring relief alongside sorrow, and then guilt may arrive because relief doesn’t fit the story we’re taught about what loving grief is supposed to feel like.

Even loving relationships aren’t emotionally simple.

You can miss somebody and be angry with them. You can love them and feel relieved that caregiving has ended. You can grieve the person who actually existed while also grieving the relationship you hoped you might someday have. You can be heartbroken by a death and still know that the relationship was unhealthy.

When someone dies, possibility dies with them. Sometimes part of what we’re grieving is that there will never be another conversation, another apology, another chance to repair something, another opportunity for the relationship to become different.

That’s still grief.

It doesn’t become less legitimate because it isn’t tidy.

There Is No Grief Olympics

We also have an odd habit of ranking losses.

People rarely say outright, “Your grief is less important than mine,” but we have cultural hierarchies around which deaths are supposed to hurt most. Certain family relationships are automatically understood as devastating while others require explanation. Friend loss can be minimized because “you weren’t related.” Chosen family may not receive the same recognition as biological family. An ex-partner may be someone you’re apparently no longer entitled to mourn. Community losses can affect thousands of people who never personally met the person who died and then be dismissed as parasocial nonsense.

And grief for animals is still routinely treated as somehow lesser than grief for humans.

I have opinions about that one.

An animal can be woven into the physical structure of your day in ways many human relationships aren’t. They’re there when you wake up. They know the sound of the food container, the car, the leash, the cabinet, or whatever household object has inexplicably become the Most Important Thing Ever. You step around them in the hallway. You know where they’ll be at certain times of day. You automatically check whether they need to go outside. You reach down without thinking because there is supposed to be a body beside your chair.

Then one day the routine continues and they don’t.

The house changes shape.

Telling somebody “it was just a dog” or “it was just a cat” doesn’t describe the relationship. It describes the speaker’s inability to understand it.

The same is true when we dismiss grief because we don’t understand why a particular relationship mattered. We don’t have to understand another person’s attachment in order to recognize that the loss is real.

Time Isn’t a Love Meter Either

Anniversaries can make all of this especially weird.

There’s an expectation that grief should become progressively smaller with time, as though every year should produce a measurable percentage decrease. Year one is terrible, year two somewhat less terrible, and eventually the anniversary should become a tasteful moment of reflection before we continue with our day.

Sometimes that happens.

Sometimes the fifth anniversary hits harder than the fourth.

Sometimes you forget the date completely and realize three days later.

Sometimes your body seems to remember before your conscious brain does and you spend a day wondering why everything feels wrong until you look at the calendar.

Sometimes an anniversary that once flattened you becomes an ordinary day.

That doesn’t mean the person mattered less.

It means time passed.

Memory changes with us. Our relationship with the dead changes because we keep changing. The version of you who experienced the loss isn’t frozen somewhere in the past, responsible for maintaining the exact emotional intensity you felt then. Life keeps adding experiences around the loss. New people arrive. Other people leave. Bodies change. Homes change. Families change. You become somebody who has lived another year.

Love doesn’t require emotional stasis.

If anything, expecting grief to remain unchanged would require us to stop living.

Joy Is Not Betrayal

This may be one of the hardest inherited ideas about grief to shake: the suspicion that feeling good after someone dies means we’re leaving them behind.

The first laugh after a major loss can feel almost obscene. For a moment you forget you’re grieving. Something is genuinely funny, your body reacts before you think about it, and then suddenly you remember.

There can be guilt in that return.

How can the world still contain something funny when this person is dead? How can food taste good? How can I enjoy a movie? How can I flirt with somebody, dance, travel, celebrate a birthday, get excited about a project, or have a perfectly ordinary good Tuesday?

Because you’re alive.

That’s not a philosophical answer. It’s a practical one.

Living bodies keep encountering living experiences. Hunger happens. Pleasure happens. Attraction happens. Curiosity happens. Somebody tells a ridiculous joke. The dog does something stupid. The weather is beautiful. A song comes on that makes you want to dance.

None of those experiences erases grief.

We have room for more than one thing.

I don’t think honoring someone requires preserving the emotional conditions of their death. If I love someone, I don’t need to maintain a certain amount of pain to keep that love legitimate. Pain may remain because loss hurts, but suffering is not proof of devotion.

The relationship was real before the grief existed.

The grief isn’t what makes it real afterward.

Neither Is Suffering Forever

There is another side to this, because rejecting the idea that grief proves love does not mean people should hurry through it.

Nobody gets extra credit for recovering quickly either.

Sometimes grief remains enormous for a long time. Sometimes it becomes tangled with trauma, depression, anxiety, complicated family dynamics, financial instability, caregiving exhaustion, or a complete restructuring of someone’s daily life. Sometimes a death changes almost every practical detail of a person’s existence, and rebuilding takes far longer than the people around them expect.

There is nothing noble about suffering without support. There is also nothing shameful about needing support for a long time.

Therapy, grief groups, spiritual practice, medication when appropriate, community care, ritual, rest, movement, creative work, and plain old human companionship can all have places in grief. Seeking help doesn’t mean someone loved too much or isn’t strong enough to handle loss independently.

We were never meant to prove the significance of our relationships by seeing how much pain we could endure alone.

That is not devotion. That’s isolation wearing ceremonial robes.

Let Love Be Love

Maybe this is why I’ve become increasingly resistant to using grief as a measure of anything except the fact that something changed.

Grief tells us there was a loss. It doesn’t give us a clean measurement of the relationship that preceded it.

Love lived in the relationship itself.

It was in the phone calls, meals, arguments, inside jokes, care, annoyance, rides to appointments, terrible birthday presents, shared music, routines, nicknames, ordinary conversations, reconciliations, and all the completely unremarkable moments nobody thought to photograph.

With animals, it was in food bowls and walks and medication and fur on absolutely everything you own. It was moving your feet because somebody was sleeping there. It was knowing which sound meant “I need something” and which meant “I have decided you need to wake up for reasons I will not be explaining.”

With friends, it may have been years of messages nobody else will ever read.

With family, it may have been traditions, arguments, caregiving, distance, reconciliation, or simply the strange intimacy of knowing someone for most of your life.

With complicated relationships, love may have existed beside things that hurt.

Grief doesn’t need to simplify any of that.

And it certainly doesn’t need to prove it.

As we talk about honoring the dead this week, I think that’s something worth remembering. Devotion isn’t measured by how miserable we remain. Remembrance doesn’t require us to keep a wound open. Continuing to live doesn’t mean somebody has become less important, and having a hard day years later doesn’t mean we’ve failed to heal.

We don’t need to compare our grief to somebody else’s, or today’s grief to the grief we felt five years ago.

We can let the relationship have been what it was.

We can let the loss be what it is.

And we can stop asking pain to provide evidence that love existed.

Love already did that. 🔮💜

Maybe they did it deliberately. There may have been religious teachings about heaven, hell, reincarnation, resurrection, spirits, ancestors, or what happens to the soul after the body dies. Maybe there were funerals where adults carefully explained what was happening, or maybe death was something the adults avoided discussing as much as possible.

A lot of the teaching wasn’t deliberate at all.

We watched what happened when someone died. We noticed whether children were included or sent somewhere else. We learned whether people cried openly or disappeared into bathrooms to do it privately. We heard adults say someone had “passed away,” “gone home,” “crossed over,” “gone to heaven,” “joined the ancestors,” or simply “died.” We noticed whether the dead person’s name kept being spoken afterward or gradually vanished from conversation.

Before we were old enough to examine any of it, we were learning the rules.

Death is frightening. Death is peaceful. Death is sacred. Death is punishment. Death is natural. Death is unfair. The dead are gone. The dead are watching. Grief should be private. Grief should be public. Funerals should be solemn. Funerals should be celebrations. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. You should tell the truth about the dead. You should let go. You should never forget.

Then eventually we’re old enough to discover that not only do people disagree about virtually all of these things, most of us have been carrying assumptions we didn’t consciously choose.

I think that’s worth examining.

Not because we need to emerge with one correct philosophy of death by the end of October. For the love of all things holy, unholy, and everything in between, we do not need to turn mortality into another research project with a final exam. I’m interested in something much simpler: noticing which of our beliefs about death and grief are actually ours.

We Learn How to Grieve by Watching Other People

Families have cultures just as surely as countries and communities do. Some families talk about absolutely everything. Others can maintain a forty-year feud without anyone ever explaining what started it. Grief enters those existing cultures rather than arriving in some emotionally neutral environment.

If a family already values stoicism, grief may be treated as something to manage privately. If emotional expression is normal, mourning may be loud and communal. If the family has strong religious beliefs, death may immediately be interpreted through those beliefs. If nobody knows how to talk about uncomfortable feelings, everyone may become very interested in casseroles.

None of those patterns necessarily tells us what an individual person needs.

They tell us what that group learned to do.

That’s an important distinction because inherited grief practices can feel like universal rules when they’re really cultural habits. Someone who needs to talk may grow up believing they’re grieving incorrectly because their family handles pain silently. Someone who needs privacy may feel pressured to perform emotion because everyone around them expects visible mourning. A person whose beliefs have changed may discover that the religious language they grew up with no longer comforts them, even though everybody else assumes it should.

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the grief itself. It’s the feeling that we’re failing to grieve the way we’re supposed to.

I don’t think there is one way we’re supposed to.

Our Language Carries Beliefs We May Not Share

The language around death fascinates me because it reveals so much about what a culture is trying to do with something difficult to comprehend.

We have created an impressive number of ways to avoid saying that somebody died.

Some of that language is beautiful. Some of it expresses genuine spiritual belief. Some of it exists because saying the word dead feels too harsh when the loss is fresh. There is nothing inherently wrong with euphemism when it serves the person using it.

But language can also quietly import assumptions.

Saying someone is “in a better place” assumes something about where they are now and, sometimes unintentionally, something about the life they left. Saying “everything happens for a reason” assumes a universe organized around meaningful causation. Saying “God needed another angel” introduces an entire theology into someone else’s grief. Saying “at least they’re no longer suffering” may be true and still be the last thing a grieving person needs to hear.

Even the secular language of grief carries assumptions. “Moving on” suggests departure. “Closure” suggests something can be completed. “Getting back to normal” assumes there is a previous normal waiting to be restored.

I’ve become much more interested in moving forward, because forward has room for luggage.

The words we use aren’t trivial. They shape the story we’re telling ourselves about what grief is supposed to accomplish.

Spiritual Belief Does Not Eliminate Uncertainty

I have my own spiritual beliefs about death. Being a witch does, in fact, come with some opinions about things.

It doesn’t come with laboratory results.

I think there’s a temptation in spiritual communities to speak about death with more certainty than any of us can actually justify. Different religions and spiritual traditions have developed beautiful, complex understandings of death, afterlife, rebirth, ancestors, spirits, and the continuation—or noncontinuation—of consciousness. Those beliefs can provide profound comfort and meaning.

They are still beliefs.

That distinction doesn’t make them less important to me. It makes me more careful about where I place them.

I can believe something deeply without insisting that another person must understand death through the same framework. I can hold spiritual possibilities without pretending I have personally audited the afterlife and brought back a flowchart.

There is room in spirituality for I don’t know.

In fact, I think “I don’t know” can be an incredibly sacred answer.

I don’t know exactly what happens after death. I have beliefs. I have experiences I interpret through those beliefs. I have traditions and practices that help me relate to death. I also have unanswered questions.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

We Also Inherit Fear

Not everything we inherit about death comes wrapped in theology or ritual. Sometimes what gets passed down is fear.

Fear of talking about death because talking about it might somehow invite it.

Fear of wills, advance directives, funeral planning, or end-of-life conversations because preparing feels too much like giving up.

Fear of saying a dead person’s name because it will upset somebody.

Fear of not saying their name because that might mean they’re being forgotten.

Fear of enjoying life after loss because happiness feels disloyal.

Fear of grieving for “too long.”

Fear of grieving for what seems like not long enough.

Fear of discovering that our response to a death is relief.

That last one can be especially complicated when the relationship was difficult or when someone had been suffering for a long time. Human emotional responses do not always organize themselves into socially acceptable categories. Love can exist beside anger. Grief can exist beside relief. Sadness can coexist with the knowledge that a boundary is no longer necessary. We can miss someone and still be honest about the ways they hurt us.

None of that fits neatly into the stories we’re usually given about mourning.

Real relationships rarely do.

Death Does Not Make a Person Simpler

One of the stories I especially want to question is the idea that death requires us to flatten somebody into the nicest possible version of themselves.

I understand where the instinct comes from. Funerals aren’t generally the place to present a comprehensive performance review. Grieving people often want to concentrate on the things they loved.

But remembering someone honestly is different from attacking them.

People remain complicated in memory because they were complicated while they were alive. Someone can have been generous and infuriating, loving and difficult, brilliant and deeply flawed. A person may have given us beautiful things while also leaving wounds we’re still figuring out.

Death doesn’t resolve those contradictions. Sometimes it makes them harder because the relationship can no longer change.

When we insist that the dead must only be spoken about positively, we can accidentally isolate people whose grief contains anger, confusion, trauma, or relief. Suddenly they’re not only grieving; they’re also policing their own memories to make sure the dead person fits the approved narrative.

I don’t think remembrance requires that.

I’d rather remember whole human beings.

Some Stories Deserve to Change

This is the part that interests me most: inherited stories are not necessarily permanent stories.

We can appreciate the ways previous generations approached death while recognizing that some of those approaches don’t serve us. We can keep rituals that bring comfort and change the ones that don’t. We can learn about traditions without assuming every tradition belongs in our own practice. We can inherit religious language and decide we no longer believe it, or rediscover a spiritual practice that previous generations abandoned.

We can also create new rituals because the old ones don’t fit the lives we’re living.

That’s not disrespecting the dead. It’s what living cultures do.

Every tradition we inherited was once something somebody was doing in the present. Someone made the food for the first time. Someone chose the song. Someone decided where people would gather, what would be said, what would be worn, what objects would be kept, and how the dead would be remembered.

We are allowed to participate in that process.

Maybe your remembrance includes an altar. Maybe it’s visiting a cemetery. Maybe it’s cooking someone’s recipe, wearing their jewelry, telling their stories, donating to something they cared about, playing their music, or keeping the ridiculous object nobody else understands.

Maybe it’s none of those things.

The ritual isn’t sacred because somebody else approves of it. It’s sacred because of the relationship between the practice and the meaning we give it.

We Get to Examine the Story

That’s what I keep returning to this week.

We inherit more than stories about the people who died. We inherit stories about death itself: what it means, what we’re supposed to believe about it, how we’re supposed to respond to it, and what grief is supposed to look like afterward.

Some of those stories may fit us beautifully.

Some may need alteration.

Some may have been useful to the people who gave them to us but make no sense in our lives.

Some may have hurt people for generations simply because nobody realized they were allowed to question them.

We don’t have to throw away everything we inherited in order to examine it. We also don’t have to preserve everything in order to honor where it came from.

We can ask where a belief originated. We can learn its cultural or religious context. We can notice whether it comforts us or frightens us, whether it creates room for grief or tries to control it. We can decide whether it’s something we actually believe or simply something we’ve heard so many times that it started sounding like truth.

And after all that examination, we’re still allowed to say, “I don’t know.”

Death is one of the oldest mysteries human beings have tried to understand. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they’ve wrapped the whole thing up neatly.

Maybe part of honoring the dead is allowing ourselves to remain curious about death.

Maybe part of honoring our ancestors is recognizing that they were trying to understand the same enormous mystery with the knowledge, language, traditions, and beliefs available to them.

Now it’s our turn.

We inherit their stories.

We listen to them.

We learn where they came from.

And then we decide which stories still belong to us. 🔮💜

After days of deliberation, the jury could not unanimously agree on whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three children. Her defense argued that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors argued that she understood what she was doing.

I am not going to tell you whether Lindsay Clancy is guilty or not guilty. I wasn’t in that jury room. I didn’t examine her. I don’t know what was happening inside her mind.

But I do know something about postpartum mental illness.

I lived it.

I experienced postpartum depression.

I was later diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

And before we go any further, I need to make something very, very clear:

Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are NOT interchangeable.

PPP is not simply “really bad postpartum depression.” They are different illnesses, and neither diagnosis automatically means that a mother wants to hurt her baby.

I wouldn’t wish postpartum depression on my worst enemy.

Postpartum psychosis?

I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

I was young when I had my first child. I was a kid raising a kid, and I was terrified.

During my postpartum depression, I experienced intrusive thoughts involving my baby. Not desires. Not plans. Not things I secretly wanted to do.

Thoughts.

Once, I was carrying my newborn with me to check the mail. The swimming pool was right next to the mailboxes, and suddenly a thought entered my head:

If I threw him into the pool, would he swim or would he sink?

I had absolutely no intention of finding out.

I didn’t want to throw him into the pool.

I didn’t want to hurt my baby.

The thought itself horrified me.

But how exactly was I supposed to tell someone that?

How do you look another human being in the eye and say, “My brain just showed me something horrifying involving my baby,” when you’re terrified that the moment those words leave your mouth, somebody will decide you’re dangerous?

I was terrified of my then-husband finding out what was happening inside my head. I was terrified of my parents finding out.

And I wanted to run.

Gods, I wanted to run.

There were so many times I wanted to pack up my son, get as far away from my husband and my parents as I possibly could, and simply start over somewhere nobody knew us.

I was scared.

I was overwhelmed.

I was a kid raising a kid.

And here is the part of the maternal mental-health conversation that makes me angry:

People love to say, “Ask for help.”

I did.

I sought treatment for postpartum depression.

Before my provider prescribed Paxil, I told her that my family had a history of reacting badly to it. She prescribed it anyway and told me that we would keep an eye on me.

So I kept going to my appointments.

I told her I wasn’t getting better.

I told her I was getting worse.

My dose was increased.

I came back.

I told her I was still getting worse.

My dose was increased again.

Then I accidentally left my medication at home when I went to Los Angeles for a three-day weekend with my parents. We lived in San Diego at the time.

And during those days without it, I felt so much better.

When I came home, I went back to my provider and told her. I convinced her that we needed to change my medication.

She agreed.

But she also told me that if I didn’t admit myself to the psychiatric ward at the Naval Hospital, she was going to contact CPS.

So I went.

The emergency department wasn’t finding a legitimate reason to admit me.

I was so frightened of what would happen if I wasn’t admitted that I lied about my symptoms to get myself hospitalized.

About 36 hours later, they sent me home because they saw no reason to keep me there.

I called my provider around 12:30 to tell her I was being discharged.

Around 2:30, police and CPS came to check on me.

My family panicked.

Initially, I voluntarily placed my son with my brother and sister-in-law while everything was sorted out.

About a month later, on my father’s birthday—the day my son turned six months old—we went to court.

CPS formally removed my baby from my custody.

So when we tell struggling mothers, “Don’t be afraid. Tell somebody. Ask for help,” I need us to understand something:

Sometimes she is afraid because the thing she is afraid of can actually happen.

That does NOT mean mothers experiencing postpartum mental illness shouldn’t seek treatment.

It means we have to do a hell of a lot better once they do.

“Ask for help” is not a maternal mental-health policy.

Someone has to listen after she asks.

Someone has to hear her when she says the treatment isn’t working.

Someone has to take her seriously when she says she is getting worse.

Someone has to understand the difference between an unwanted intrusive thought that horrifies her and an intention to hurt someone.

Someone has to understand that sometimes a person discloses a frightening thought precisely because she doesn’t want it.

And we have to create systems in which mothers can tell the truth about what is happening inside their heads without wondering whether honesty itself will destroy their families.

Because losing custody didn’t magically make me well.

My mental health deteriorated further.

I was eventually diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

I don’t know exactly when the psychosis began. Looking back, I believe it started after the formal loss of custody of my son. There are things from that period that make much more sense to me in light of the diagnosis.

The paranoia.

Thinking that became significantly more disorganized than was normal for me.

Impulsive decisions that I look back on now and cannot imagine making if I had been in my right mind.

And sleep.

Oh, gods, the sleep.

I slept so much.

My suicidal thoughts became much worse after I lost custody of my son.

And still, people could look at me and think I was fine.

My best friend did.

And when I say “best friend,” I don’t mean someone who barely knew me.

Tammy and I had been roommates in Navy “A” school. She knew me. She knew my then-husband. She had been supposed to be part of our wedding. This woman knew me better than most people did.

And during this period, she genuinely thought I didn’t care that I had lost custody of my baby.

Why?

Because she watched me leave visits with him composed.

When she finally said that she thought I didn’t care, my then-husband looked at her in shock.

“You know Di. You honestly think she didn’t care?”

Because he knew what happened after we got home.

I would make it through the visit.

I would make it through saying goodbye.

I would maintain my composure in front of my brother, his wife, my best friend and, most importantly, my baby.

Then I would get home.

I would go straight to my bedroom, throw myself onto my bed, and sob into my pillow for an hour.

I wasn’t cold.

I wasn’t okay.

I was a mother maintaining composure in front of her child.

We cannot determine how sick, frightened, or devastated a mother is by how well she performs composure in front of us.

Sometimes composure isn’t evidence that someone is okay.

Sometimes it is evidence that she has decided this is not the place where she is allowed to fall apart.

My best friend knew me better than almost anyone, and even she couldn’t see what was happening behind my composure.

So perhaps we need to stop pretending we can determine the severity of someone’s suffering simply by looking at them.

There is another moment from that period that has never left me.

After the hospitalization, my medication was changed.

On the first day of the new medication, my then-husband had been watching me for a while.

Finally, he looked at me and said:

“I have the woman I fell in love with back.”

I had been that bad.

I am deliberately not claiming that a particular medication caused everything that happened to me. I can’t establish that, and I won’t pretend that I can.

I can tell you what I experienced.

I can tell you what I reported.

I can tell you that I repeatedly said I was getting worse.

I can tell you that I felt dramatically better during those accidental days without that medication.

I can tell you that the person who lived with me saw such an enormous difference after my medication was changed that he told me he finally had the woman he fell in love with back.

And I can tell you that I was ultimately diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

That is my story.

The Lindsay Clancy case is not my story.

I will not say, “I could have been her.”

I don’t know that.

I will not use the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy to make a dramatic point about my own life.

Three children are dead.

Their lives matter.

Their father and everyone who loved them has suffered an unimaginable loss.

We can grieve those children while still demanding compassion and competent care for people experiencing severe postpartum mental illness.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

Caring about children’s safety does not require us to stop caring about their mothers.

My son deserved to be safe.

So did his mother.

Those statements were never supposed to be in opposition.

And that is why I am talking about Lindsay Clancy’s case today.

Not because I can tell you what was happening inside her mind.

Not because I can give you the verdict that the jury itself could not unanimously reach.

I’m talking about it because maternal mental illness should not become important only after something horrific happens.

A mother should not have to die for us to take her suicidal thoughts seriously.

A child should not have to die for us to take a mother’s psychiatric symptoms seriously.

A family should not have to be torn apart before we ask whether a struggling mother received the care she actually needed.

And a mother should not have to prove that she is falling apart by falling apart in front of us.

The absence of death is not evidence that everyone was okay.

I survived.

My son survived.

We were not okay.

My story didn’t become national news.

There weren’t reporters outside the courthouse. Strangers didn’t debate my mental state on television. Nobody turned what happened to my family into a headline.

But it was serious before I was hospitalized.

It was serious before CPS knocked on my door.

It was serious before I lost custody.

It was serious before I became suicidal.

It was serious before I was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.

I was already sick when I was simply a frightened young mother trying desperately to hold herself together.

So stop asking what a suffering mother is supposed to look like.

Stop assuming that because she is functioning, she is fine.

Stop assuming that because she can smile, speak coherently, care for her baby, attend an appointment, or hold herself together long enough to walk out the front door, you know what happens after that door closes.

Listen to what she is telling you.

And when she tells you that something is wrong, keep listening.

For the love of all things holy, unholy, and everything in between:

Stop waiting until maternal mental illness becomes tragedy before we decide it was serious.