What If Nothing Is Wrong With You?
When difficulty starts to feel like a personal failing
There are times when the way you are living feels so difficult that you begin to wonder whether the problem is you. Perhaps you keep getting overwhelmed. Perhaps you can't seem to make yourself do things that appear easy for everyone else. Perhaps the same relationship patterns keep appearing. Perhaps you know what you want to do but can't seem to do it. Or perhaps you simply don't feel like yourself anymore.
It is easy to turn these experiences into a verdict:
· Something is wrong with me.
· I should be coping better.
· Why can't I just get myself together?
But difficulty is not evidence of defect!
What your response may be trying to manage
A useful place to begin is to become curious about the response rather than judging it. What happens when you feel overwhelmed? Do you withdraw? Become hyper-alert? Keep thinking things through? Try harder? Avoid making decisions? Look after everyone else while losing contact with yourself?
These responses may not be helping you now. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are meaningless or irrational. Sometimes a response that once helped you manage something difficult continues long after the circumstances have changed. The question then becomes less: “What's wrong with me?” and more: “What is this response trying to manage?” And that is a very different question.
You can be struggling without being broken
There is another distinction worth making. Something can be difficult without being damaged. You can be exhausted without being incapable. You can be confused without lacking intelligence. You can be stuck without having lost the capacity to move. You can have developed patterns that no longer serve you without those patterns defining who you are. And you can need help without being a problem that somebody else needs to fix.
This doesn't mean everything we experience should simply be accepted. Some patterns cause real harm. Some responses need to change. Sometimes professional support is important. But change and self-condemnation are not the same thing.
Kintsugi and what becomes visible after things fall apart
There is a popular metaphor for making sense of damage in human life: Kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer, traditionally mixed with powdered gold. It is often presented as a beautiful idea about becoming more valuable because of the cracks and I wonder if there is another way to understand it.
Perhaps the interesting part isn't that the broken pot becomes beautiful. Perhaps it is what becomes visible when something we thought was whole can no longer hold itself together. Sometimes life does this to us. Something we trusted, depended upon or built our identity around falls away. A relationship ends. A role disappears. Certainties stop making sense. The future we assumed we were moving towards no longer exists. The temptation is to see this as evidence that we have broken. But sometimes, in the space created by what has fallen away, something else becomes possible.
For me, this is where the image of the gold becomes more interesting. I don't think of it simply as the beauty we add to our wounds. I think of it as the things we discover when our usual ways of holding ourselves together are no longer enough. For some people, that may be faith. It may be a deeper sense of what matters. It may be a relationship with God that was previously assumed rather than consciously lived. It may be a truth that was difficult to hear while everything else seemed secure. The gold does not make the breaking necessary. Nor does it make suffering good. But sometimes what holds us together is discovered only after something else has fallen apart.
What if the difficulty contains information?
Instead of asking only “How do I stop feeling like this?”, you might also ask:
What happened just before I started to feel this way?
What am I trying to protect myself from?
What am I carrying that I haven't acknowledged?
What have I been expecting myself to tolerate?
Is there something I already know that I keep overriding?
What would become possible if I stopped treating my response as evidence against myself?
You may discover that what you have been calling a personal failing is actually telling you something about the conditions you are living in, the demands you are carrying, or the direction your life is taking. You may also discover that something you once relied upon is no longer sufficient, and that this is asking you to find a different way of being held.
Jumping to better questions
That information matters. You don't have to decide that everything is fine in order to stop believing that you are the problem. Sometimes the first movement towards change is simply becoming willing to look at yourself with enough curiosity to find out what is actually happening. What if the part of you that you have been trying to fix is actually trying to tell you something? And what if the assumption that you need fixing is getting in the way of hearing it?
It reminds me of a poster I once saw that says: We get enough exercise around here: jumping to conclusions. Perhaps there is another kind of jumping worth practising. Jumping to better questions.
