When you're good & ready
on changing your life
Hi friends,
I began 2025 on a high note, determined to make some much needed and long talked about but seemingly impossible to implement changes to my life. I had a breakthrough in therapy on the sixth of January that surprised even my therapist and when she inquired about the new conviction with which it appeared I was considering these changes I told her it felt like things that had been shifting very slowly for years were now happening all at once (or, “gradually, then suddenly,” as Ernest Hemingway once wrote).
In My Good Bright Wolf — her fabulous(ly honest) memoir about (among many things) living with anorexia — Sarah Moss writes:
Insight doesn’t naturally lead to action. Understanding a problem is not the same as solving it. It is possible to exist for a surprisingly long time with life-limiting difficulties whose solutions are known. The human capacity for getting used to things can be a terrible strength.
I felt these words deeply, both as someone with an eating disorder history and as my current self, this contemporary version of me no longer constrained by anorexia (thank goddess) but still limited in other capacities by the perpetuation of certain behaviors and patterns of thinking/believing that have continued to cause me harm even as my awareness of their possible (probable) solutions has also only grown.
I have many times wished for insight to instantaneously convert to action. It never does. Or very rarely. At least not for me. In most cases, I have to marinate in the awareness of it all for longer than I’d like (years! sometimes) before any tangible change can materialize in my life. This is a frustrating but often necessary part of the process, and I have found that a prolonged period of insight can foster self-compassion if I allow it do so. It can nurture a deeper understanding of why I started behaving in ways I now wish I could stop, an acknowledgement that the past version of me who first set certain patterns in motion was doing her best, surviving the only way she could based on what she knew at the time and utilizing whatever resources (both internal and external) she had at her disposal.
In my clinical work, I am lucky enough to be privy to the incremental, sometimes barely perceptible but deceptively profound shifts people make in their lives, seemingly insignificant changes that ultimately lead to more comprehensive transformations. Changing your life often starts with waking up to the ACTUAL REALITY you’re currently living, acknowledging what’s not working, and finally (finally!) telling yourself the truth. Which is NOT for the faint of heart. Being honest with yourself about your life — about the ways you might be participating in the perpetuation of your own suffering or (both consciously and unconsciously) keeping yourself stuck — is brave. Really fucking brave. Because doing so almost always compels you towards change, as it becomes increasingly untenable for you to continue remaining the same.
I was raised on a steady diet of personal responsibility, mind over matter, and facts before feelings. It was a little (A LOT) light on the empathy, lacking in emotional competency or any consideration for broader contexts, systemic forces, or individual proclivities. I learned to blame myself for almost everything, desperately chased perfection, sought validation through compulsive people-pleasing (codependency, anyone?), and internalized massive amounts of shame. FUN! I had to spend years — many MANY years — deconstructing these (cultural, religious, familial) lessons, making sense of my response to them, identifying the habits and techniques younger me devised to get by in an environment that so often failed to recognize and meet her (very reasonable and developmentally requisite) needs.
This process of deconstruction was likely indiscernible to most everyone but me — my external life didn’t appreciably change but my internal landscape was consistently shifting, my ideas about myself, my relationships, my work, the world, undergoing a massive overhaul and reconfiguration. For a while — a LONG while, tbh — I needed to hang out in the space of awareness and understanding, learn how to show myself kindness and compassion, stop blaming myself for not surviving more optimally, and celebrate myself for surviving at all. And I needed to release myself from any obligation to move immediately from insight to actively remodeling the extrinsic topography of my life.
THE PAUSE WAS IMPERATIVE. (It usually is.)
But I will also fully admit to losing sight of my agency at various points along the way. There were moments (hours, days, months, years) of falling into despair, of feeling resigned to my life as it was, of assuming (inaccurately, I now know) some of my habits and patterns and strategies for survival were too deeply ingrained, pre-determined by my past, too woven into my identity to ever not be that way. And after over-indexing for so long on self-reliance and delusions of control (childhood lessons die hard), releasing myself from fault and letting myself off the hook for ever being any different felt like a necessary step on the road towards implementing lasting or meaningful change.
There is a lot of space between It’s all my fault that I’m like this and This is just who I am. The opportunity for changing our lives exists in that space. Because there are so many external factors that impact and sometimes impede our ability to do, have, or be what we want. Personal responsibility has its limits. For some folks more than others. BUT I also believe we have more power than we think — more than those at the so-called top want us to see — to create lives that are more aligned with what we need and desire and more reflective of the values by which we purport to abide.
What’s my point with all this rambling? I have a few, I think. First, be kind to yourself. Shaming yourself into changing DOES NOT WORK. As Anaïs Nin once wrote, “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
Second, changing your life takes time, is made up of many small, often undetectable shifts, is taking place below the surface — sometimes for a long, LONG time — before it becomes manifest in the material world. You are rarely as stuck as you think you are.
Third, nobody builds a new life on their own, NO ONE (regardless of what they might tell themselves or publicly claim) is self-made. Community is everything. Relationships are everything.
Fourth, let other people have their opinions about your life. Relinquish the compulsive need to please them all. (I’m still working on this one, too.)
Finally, I want to acknowledge that the current political climate really fucking sucks (UNDERSTATEMENT) and that I, as a person with various intersecting privileges, will likely be far less affected than many folks out there. I recognize that I retain more agency under these conditions than a lot of other people. But I still think most of us aren’t as powerless as they want us to believe we are. And we can’t afford to forfeit our joy or our pleasure or our commitment to effecting change, we can’t fold in the face of what the bro-ligarchy is trying to do. I am not an activist, but I’m a person who cares a lot. And I believe pushing back also looks like building the fullest, most unapologetically joy-filled lives we can.
I say it a lot but I’ll say it again: Thanks for being here. Go tell your people you love them.
xoxo
❍ I love Oliver Burkeman’s work and highly recommend his free twice monthly newsletter. He recently wrote about the 70% rule — which sums up my new approach to this substack. I want to write more this year (I know, I know, I say that every year) and shooting for 70% good enough is my new target goal. Anything more than that and I freeze (obviously, considering my lack of regular correspondence).
❍ Things I Learned From Falling by Claire Nelson
❍ Reckoning With This Vicious World by Heather Havrilesky — one of the best things I’ve read on the current state of things
❍ Love is not all we need by Celeste Davis — I highly recommend Celeste’s newsletter, Matriarchal Blessing
❍ Truer Crime Podcast with Celisia Stanton — a more nuanced approach to true crime that is desperately needed
❍ The Gilded Age of Medicine is Here by Dhruv Kullar — this interview with the author is also a good listen