I used to have a list. Not a to-do list, but a “fix-me” list. Somatic experiencing on Mondays, shadow-work on Wednesdays, and ancestral clearing if I had a bad weekend. I thought I was “doing the work.” I thought if I just found the right modality, I’d finally stop feeling like a glitch in the system.
Then I stumbled onto this and it kind of slapped me in the face.
It hit me—I wasn’t actually getting better; I was just getting better at being a patient. I’d turned my life into a professional resume for a job I never actually applied for, but was paying a premium to keep.
Someone over at Sacred Anarchy put it even more bluntly:
“Wellness expands every year, not because humanity is healing, but because suffering has been successfully rebranded as an identity.”
Sacred Anarchy
The industry doesn’t actually want you “healed”—that’s a lost customer. They want you on a maintenance plan. They want you to believe there’s always one more layer, one more hidden trauma, one more “breakthrough” just twelve steps away.
I read this piece on the “Perpetual Patient” and it felt like someone was reading my bank statements and my diary at the same time.
“We have created a class of perpetual patients who are so busy processing their past that they have no bandwidth left to inhabit their present.”
Tye and Tie
When the “healing journey” becomes your full-time job, you stop living and start processing. You become a specialist in your own pathology instead of a partner in your own life.
If you’re exhausted by the repair manual approach to your existence, you might want to look at the healing treadmill. Sometimes the most healing thing you can do is just… quit the job.
Go outside. Get some dirt under your fingernails. Be a beautiful, unoptimized mess. It’s a lot more fun.