Maybe You Don’t Need to Fix Yourself

I have been getting in trouble for not sleeping at night since I was three years old.

I actually remember my Holly Hobbie bedroom. Pink canopy bed, matching everything, and my mother sitting on the edge of that bed trying to explain to tiny little me that it was late and I really needed to close my eyes and try to go to sleep. The problem was, I wasn’t tired.

By six or seven, I was getting in trouble for staying up reading or wandering around the house like a tiny fucking ghost because, again, I wasn’t tired.

This has been true my entire life. Give me midnight and I am ready to solve the mysteries of the universe. Four or five o’clock in the morning rolls around, the sky starts getting lighter, and suddenly my entire body goes, Oh, thank the gods. Bedtime.

I sleep better during the day. I always have, but that hasn’t stopped me from spending most of my adult life trying to change it. For years, I’ve done the nighttime minerals. The sleepy-time teas. The tart cherry juice. The sleep aids. The strict bedtimes. The alarms. The this time I’m really going to get myself on a normal schedule schedules. And some of them work... For a while.

I can absolutely train myself to go to bed at what the rest of the world considers a respectable hour and wake up when a productive adult is apparently supposed to wake up, but it never worked for me. The second I stop trying to force it, my body goes right back to its nocturnal preferences.

Sometimes it takes loving someone else to recognize yourself

The realization that maybe I didn't need to fix it didn’t come from some deep period of self-reflection. It came because summer ended, which meant school schedules were coming back, and I had to start getting up around seven in the morning so I could get my son out the door and to the bus on time.

I was dreading it.

A few weeks before school was due to start, my youngest son was having an especially hard time getting his sleep schedule turned back around. During summer and school vacations, that kid is perfectly happy staying up half the night and sleeping until noon the next day.

Nighttime is when he’s awake. It’s when he’s productive. It’s when his body seems happiest being awake. Then school comes back around and suddenly we’re trying to convince his body that this thing it naturally wants to do is no longer acceptable because the bus will be here in the morning.

I was thinking about how hard nighttime sleep has always been for him and how easily he sleeps during the day. And then BAM. Pot, meet kettle.

Holy shit. He’s just like me.

And that’s when it hit me hard, because when I looked at him, I didn’t see something wrong with him that needed to be fixed. I saw the way his body naturally worked.

Yes, he still has to go to school. Yes, we still have to figure out how to work with the schedule life currently requires of him. Just like I have clients and responsibilities and don’t know many people looking for a Gift Focused Session at two o’clock in the morning.

But accommodating the world we live in and believing there’s something wrong with the way we’re naturally wired are two completely different things.

Looking at my son and accepting him exactly as he was made me realize I had spent years refusing to give myself the same acceptance.

And that made me wonder:

What else have I spent my life trying to change simply because somebody else told me that’s not how I’m supposed to be?

Maybe somebody else’s normal isn’t your blueprint

I’m a New Englander. Deeply.

We are wonderful, caring, compassionate people. We’re just not necessarily nice. We’re bully cheerleaders. We genuinely want you to succeed. We believe in you. We’ll show up when everything goes to shit, help you drag the body out of the metaphorical ditch, bring snacks, and probably make fun of you while we’re doing it.

We’ll also look you directly in the face and say, Bud, you’re fucking up. You’re better than this. Stop fucking up.

That’s love where I’m from. It puts the power back in your hands, but it also puts the responsibility there.

Not everybody experiences that kind of communication the same way. Some people will misunderstand me. Some will assign motivations to me that aren’t mine. Some will create an entire story about what I meant without ever asking me. Meanwhile, I’m probably sitting here watching a squirrel hop through my yard and wondering how I can talk to my spirit guides about something I’m too emotionally attached to see clearly.

I’ve spent plenty of time thinking my personality needs fixing, but I’m beginning to understand that it doesn’t. Some people will just be dedicated to misunderstanding me. That doesn’t mean I get to be an asshole and announce, Well, that’s just who I am. That would also be deeply irresponsible. That’s a refusal to grow masked as radical self-acceptance.

You can be perfect and deeply fucking flawed

I believe you are perfect exactly as you are. I also believe you’re deeply flawed. So am I. Those things aren’t contradictory.

We’re supposed to grow. We’re supposed to shift. New experiences should affect us. New information should sometimes change our minds.

Sometimes somebody tells you something about yourself and it hurts, because they’re right.

Sometimes you realize your behavior is hurting somebody.

Sometimes something that protected you once isn’t serving you anymore.

Sometimes you simply learn better.

Then grow.

We’re not supposed to stay stagnant.

We know what happens when things stay stagnant.

They get gross.

But there’s a difference between growth and spending your life trying to correct every part of yourself that doesn’t match somebody else’s blueprint.

That difference requires discernment.

And that’s where my spiritual gifts come into this.

Self-trust doesn’t mean believing everything you think

There are times when I know I’m too emotionally attached to something to see it clearly.

I want a particular outcome. I want Spirit to tell me I’m getting my way. Sometimes I am essentially having a grown-up metaphysical tantrum. It happens.

Those are the moments when I lean even harder on my spirit guides. I work closely with them. They’re a very personal part of my spiritual practice, and when I know I’m caught between what I want and what I actually need to understand, I talk to them.

I might ask them to help me understand what is most likely to happen if I keep pushing down the road I’m on.

If I’m stuck between two choices, I’ll ask them to help me look at the likely outcome of each.

If they were standing in my shoes, which direction would they lean?

Then comes the hard part:

I have to be willing to hear an answer I don’t fucking want.

I’ve learned to trust them over my fear. They’ve never led me wrong. I have absolutely led myself wrong. Usually by not listening, engaging in a little fuck-around-and-find-out behavior, or occasionally doing things for the plot. That’s on me. And sometimes I don’t get clarity immediately.

So I stop.

I go sit outside on my front porch underneath the grandma lilac tree. I feel the mountain breeze on my face. I look around at this beautiful place I get to live. And I let myself not know for a minute. That is what living with spiritual gifts actually looks like for me.

It’s not knowing everything.

It’s not blindly trusting every thought that enters my head.

It’s being able to sit in discomfort and trust that the answer will come when I don’t know what to do.

It’s curiosity.

It’s observation.

It’s discernment.

It’s knowing myself well enough to recognize the difference between:

This is something about myself I need to work on.

and

This is something about myself I need to stop trying to fix.

What if you left it alone?

So here’s something I’ve been wondering lately.

What are you trying to fix about yourself right now?

And more importantly:

Why?

Is it hurting you?

Is it hurting somebody else?

Has life given you new information that suggests you need to grow?

Or is somebody else’s story living in your head?

Is somebody else’s life trying to become the blueprint for yours?

Maybe you’re too loud.

Too quiet.

Too emotional.

Too direct.

Too weird.

Maybe you swear too much.

Maybe you have an accent you’ve spent years trying to hide.

Maybe you need more time alone than other people understand.

Maybe your brain works differently.

Maybe, like me, your body has apparently been campaigning against mornings since approximately 1985.

If it’s hurting you, work on it.

If you’re hurting other people, take responsibility.

If people are hurting because of who you are, your boundaries, or a story they’ve created about you, step back. Let them have their feelings without automatically making them yours to fix.

If you’ve learned something new, let yourself change.

But if it’s working for you, it’s not hurting you, and it’s not hurting anybody else?

Fuck it.

Leave it alone.

You don’t need to become a better version of somebody else. You need to become a better version of you. That’s what the path is all about: becoming a more fully realized version of yourself. One you understand. One you embrace. One you’re actually happy to wrap your arms around and say, Yeah. I fucking like this person.

Revel in your differences. Your weirdness. Your accent. Your flaws. Your nocturnal tendencies and all. Not everything about you needs fixing.

Some things are meant to be understood. Some are meant to be embraced.

Some are meant to be enjoyed.

Find the joy in being exactly who you are.

And let yourself be that person, no matter what the world has to say about it.