Unfortunately, You May Need To Change Your Life To Heal

I’m a seeker. I’m nearly 40 years old now and have spent the majority of my life categorizing myself as a “growth junkie.” It doesn’t matter whether I’ve been in a happy period, a sad one, downright depressed, in transition or not – most of my life, no matter what’s going on around me, I was usually seeking growth. A new challenge. Getting out of my comfort zone.

Like all humans, I’ve had and have things I need to heal. Experiences from childhood or early relationships or even just surviving in certain identities in the world. And being the growth junkie that I am, I always felt like my healing would happen through experiences. I thought if I gave myself growth opportunities, I would, well, continue to grow and the unstated idea was that I would grow through the things I needed to heal and eventually grow beyond them.

I believed in growth and change in every area of my life. Mental fitness, physical fitness, work, relationships. I was what one might be called an “optimizer” before we all really used “optimize” in day-to-day parlance.

All that worked okay for me until I went through the biggest, most earth-shattering loss of my life. A loss that I’m still not even close to “recovered from” (if that’s a real thing) over two years later. The loss overlaid itself on top of years of burnout from being a lawyer, being a wife, being a person of color in a country that hates us, being a woman, being the “good” daughter, being a third culture kid. It was also added onto by the current political climate in the country of my birth – a country I’ve always hated and felt in my spiritual bones was never right for me. It was the perfect storm, and I simply couldn’t handle it.

Then the growth junkie changed into a healing junkie.

Suddenly, all the modalities I used to look for to put myself in uncomfortable situations didn’t work because I needed the opposite – I needed a space for comfort instead. I needed to learn all about “healing.” I needed to recover from my burnout. I needed to integrate my identities. I needed every article, every book, every TikTok, every expert available on learning to heal yourself, and I definitely needed to discard my current rotational list of media on learning to grow yourself.

I needed, you might say, to optimize my healing.

So I did. I went back to talk therapy. I added in somatic therapy. I went to ancient energy healers for their physical practices, like a Temazcal in Mexico. I looked into plant medicine. I made appointments with spiritualists who tutored online to figure out how to get more in touch with my “higher self.” I returned to the study of a religion I had grown up with but long-since abandoned – Hinduism. I started reading the Bible. I listened to podcasts from neurologists about loss. I asked friends their views on the afterlife to help ascertain my own. I scoured every resource on the internet for the most optimized routines to promote emotional healing and recovery from burnout – the slow-living, self-care, no-coffee-only-herbal-tea, meditation, yoga, journaling daily schedule.

And it worked. For a while. I was out of the house. I was seeing friends. I was exercising like normal. Eating right, sleeping enough. I was working days a normal lawyer might work. I had optimized my way through grief and burnout. I had “won” healing.

Or had I?

One day, out of what seemed like nowhere, it stopped working. I fell apart. I woke up and decided I simply couldn’t live the life I had been living, and I had to burn down every bit and start again.

And when I hit that restart button, it made me realize I hadn’t “won” healing at all. Instead, what I had done is apply a clinical analysis and routine overlay to a deeply human state of emotional disarray because I had been sold (and believed) the lie that all I needed were a few simple tweaks to my lifestyle to be happy and find peace. I needed the perfect morning smoothie or the perfect Pilates routine and definitely the perfect therapist and maybe the perfect bottle of pills, and I’d be good.

But it’s a lie.

Turns out, there’s absolutely nothing you can add to a broken life that will allow you to find happiness and peace. What you have to do is unbreak the life, and that’s a lot harder, messier, and gloomier than “optimizing.” Unbreaking a life requires, in fact, subtraction.

Now look, if you’re still with me, you might be starting to check out about now. I know I would have if I had read this same article six months ago. Because the reality is, optimizing is intoxicating and addictive. The idea that we just haven’t found the right routine or the right therapy or the right cocktail of meds. It’s so much easier to add.

But eventually, you’ll get to a place where you add so much the foundation breaks because despite all of the additions, you still aren’t healed, let alone happy or at peace.

And then, like I did, you’ll be forced to review the cracks in the foundation.

You’ll take out the new adds – the new therapies, the new meds, the new routines. And you’ll think, momentarily, ok, maybe it was just too much. But you still won’t feel happy or at peace, and then you’ll begin to realize the foundation wasn’t just cracked all along, it was built in entirely the wrong way.

For me, this meant I had to realize a long list of things that were messy and uncomfortable: I didn’t like anything about the traditional life I had built. I hated the city I lived in, I hated the people in it, I hated being a “wife” in the traditional sense, I hated owning a home, I couldn’t stand another minute in the United States, I was creatively starved because I was professionally overfed. I missed waking up every day and feeling like I was living a life I wouldn’t regret when I was 80.

Unfortunately, I’ve learned that healing can only come from authenticity. If you wake up every day and hate your life, no amount of adding will bring you any closer to peace.

For me, that has meant dismantling every single identity I thought was unchangeable so that I could remember who I really am. That has meant saying no a lot more than saying yes. That has meant leaving the United States. That has meant modifying my definition of “wife” to something that fits me better.

And most of all, it has meant continuing to try to like myself and my life more every single day by intentional, clear-eyed, authentic decision-making.

To me, “winning” healing has meant realizing that once I finally stopped running from myself, I could feel more happiness within myself.

And maybe that’s what it’ll mean for you too. So maybe take a break from adding – you just might find all the answers you ever wanted in subtraction.