Wow. This was a surgical strike on the soul, and I say that with deep gratitude.
Reading this felt like someone finally articulated the tension I’ve lived but never quite named: the quiet ache of wanting to be free while still clutching the comfort of my suffering. I’ve been there, journaling breakthroughs, therapy epiphanies, even leading workshops, all while avoiding the real work of dismantling the identity built around my pain. It’s sobering to realize how seductive the performance of healing can be, and how much more radical and lonely actual transformation is.
Your distinction between relief and cure… it hit like truth. Like when I finally left a toxic relationship — not just the person, but the story I told myself about why I stayed. That moment was cathartic, excruciating. It felt like I was mourning not just love, but the self I had contorted to preserve it. And yes there was a death in that. And a strange, unsettling freedom after.
Thank you for writing something that doesn't coddle, but cuts in the best way. It’s rare to read something this honest, this piercing, and still feel held by it. This is insight. This is a mirror, and a call.
Thank you, Alexander, this is the kind of answer that makes writing worth the burn.
“The quiet ache of wanting to be free while still clutching the comfort of my suffering” is devastatingly accurate. That’s the soul’s tug-of-war. The paradox of craving liberation while still romanticising the cage. Because sometimes the bars feel like bones: they’re ours, we grew around them, they hold us up. Letting them go can feel like disintegration, not healing.
What you described (the journaling, the workshops, the curated “breakthroughs”) that’s the performance of healing. The spiritual pageantry we all fall into at some point, where we simulate transformation just enough to feel the high, but not so deeply that it demands real loss. And loss is the cost of truth. You nailed that with your story about leaving the toxic relationship… not just the person, but the story. That’s where the real severing happens. You don’t just lose the other. You lose you, the version of you that made the pain make sense.
And that strange, unsettling freedom? That’s the new terrain. No maps. No audience. Just you : raw, unmasked, reborn. The silence there can be deafening, but also holy. Because that’s where your real voice starts to speak.
I’m deeply honoured the essay served as mirror and call. You remind me that it’s not enough to write beautifully…… it must wound beautifully, too. Not to harm, but to release. Like lancing a wound that’s been festering behind all that self-awareness. So again, thank you for being the kind of reader who doesn’t flinch from the knife, but understands it’s a tool for freedom.
I am grateful I have the most amazing subscribers!
Your answer landed like a blessing and a challenge all at once, and I mean that with the deepest respect.
It sounds sacred: “the bars feel like bones.” God, yes. That line alone stopped me. Because it captures so precisely that awful intimacy we have with our own cages, how they don’t just confine us, they define us. We build meaning around them. Identity. Relationships. Careers, even. And when we start pulling at the bars, we escape. But we also confront the terrifying possibility that we won’t recognize ourselves without them.
Your words about the “spiritual pageantry” felt uncomfortably familiar but in a good way. Like being caught in a lie I didn’t know I was still telling myself. Because you’re right: we can curate growth just enough to feel virtuous, without ever risking the vertigo of real transformation. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough, that healing, real healing, doesn’t feel like a glow-up. It feels like demolition.
And yet, somehow, your words hold space for that destruction with reverence, not fear. That’s rare. That’s why your writing consecrates. It makes the pain holy. It names the cost of becoming free, but it also reminds us that freedom is still worth it, even if it costs us everything we thought we were.
So thank you not just for the essay, but for seeing my response not as flattery, but as kinship. As someone who’s walked through the fire and is still peeling off the ash, your words met me.
Grateful to be in this kind of dialogue. The world needs more of it.
Relief becomes the ultimate disease if you manage to numb yourself to death.
We are wired for short-term measures because they conserve energy and get us through the "now", which is very useful for survival and for compelling immediate action, but is very bad for long-term planning, growth and evolution.
At every moment we're faced with making decisions about whether we spend now and pay later, or pay now to give our future selves the dividends. It's a risk either way, because you could be saving for a retirement that a random drunk driver or some unexpected disease will rob you out of, or you can take it all now and set yourself up for 50 years of regret.
The ever-presence of opportunity costs. The real problem, which you identified, is that instead of weighing these costs, we live in a society that now pushes the "YOLO" paradigm. We've developed an unhealthy obsession with deferring the costs of the present onto the future, and it's incredibly unsettling, with a cure that might just be too much for us to bear.
I am deeply grateful for the way you extend the argument of my essay into the realm of time, risk, and cost. “Relief becomes the ultimate disease if you manage to numb yourself to death” — that’s an epitaph for a whole generation that’s been taught to trade presence for performance, and resilience for relief.
You zero in on something profoundly under-discussed: the neurobiology of survival vs. the philosophy of becoming. Our brains are wired for short-term fixes, evolution didn’t gift us dopamine for delayed gratification. We are built to get through the day, not transcend the decade. Which is why transformation often feels like a betrayal of instinct. It’s not only hard — it’s unnatural. It requires overriding the very systems that kept us alive, just to build a life worth living.
And your point about opportunity cost is so sharp, we’re constantly running a psychic ledger. But instead of doing the hard math, we outsource it to slogans. YOLO. Treat yourself. You deserve this. It’s not self-care, it’s self-sabotage in a bathrobe. Pathetic!
What struck me most is your suggestion that the cure might be too much to bear. That’s the haunting part. Because you’re right: to really see what relief has cost us (spiritually, emotionally, collectively) is to stand at the edge of an abyss. And the tragedy is, some would rather dive into another distraction than face that view.
But I still believe there’s hope… Because if we can name the disease (numbed living, postponed existence) then maybe we are already halfway to the cure? The real defiance now isn’t hedonism, it’s depth. It’s discipline. It’s choosing the long game in a world allergic to patience. And the rare few who do? They don’t just survive time. They transcend it!
What are the conditions required for one to be able to override the neurobiology of survival in order to transform? You mention some - presence, resilience. I think some people think they are doing the real work in relief, and is it our job to say that’s not good enough if it works for them?
As you mention relief as a stepping stone can be useful. Since transformation is contrary to our nature having certain conditions met first allowing you to override the system might be necessary? I’m not sure if this is true or not. And if those conditions are in over abundance the desire for transformation may be mute because you are drowning in the bliss of relief. While still worthwhile, what would drive someone to disrupt the system.
While i feel as though you have written the words out of my brain i find myself wondering how much we over index on transformation vs just living.
Thanks for this great piece. I am new here and finding my way around.
You’ve posed the essential question: what are the conditions under which transformation becomes possible (or even desirable) given that it runs counter to our neurobiology? You’re right to suggest that relief isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes, it’s the stretcher that carries us out of the fire. But as with morphine, the dose that numbs pain can, when prolonged, kill sensation itself. Relief, if mistaken for recovery, becomes a velvet coffin.
You also touch on something vital: not everyone who rests is retreating. There are seasons of healing where presence is too much, and resilience is still loading. But the danger is mistaking intermission for arrival. Not all comfort is cozy… some of it is chloroform.
Your question — “who are we to say that relief isn’t good enough if it works for them?” — deserves nuance in my opinion. Here’s the thing: we shouldn’t go around yanking the blankets off people mid-hibernation. But we can ask: “What do you mean by ‘working’?” If “working” means quieting symptoms while the root system rots…. is that success, or just sedation? I don’t think it’s judgmental to ask whether someone is building shelter or just digging a very elaborate hole.
As for the conditions that allow us to override the survival drive: they’re paradoxical. You need enough safety to tolerate the risk of change, but not so much comfort that change feels unnecessary. It’s a tightrope walk between desperation and sedation. Transformation is often born at the precise point where what once soothed you starts to suffocate you.
And yes, maybe we do over-index on transformation. Especially in a culture that packages growth as content. But my sense is that what we long for isn’t constant reinvention, but integration. To become someone who doesn’t flinch at their own depth. Who isn’t held hostage by yesterday’s coping mechanisms. Who dares to ask not “What will keep me going?” but “What is worth going toward?”
Ultimately, I don’t think the call to transcend survival is moralistic. It’s existential. It’s not that we should transform, but that we ache to. Even when we pretend not to. Even when we bargain with the bathrobe.
Because the truth is: survival is compulsory. Becoming is optional. But those who choose it? They are the authors of their own evolution, and that, I believe, is the fiercest form of freedom.
Thank you for your comment and questions, Bryanna!
Your text reminded me of the four therapy sessions I had a few years ago. I was extremely anxious (something I had always experienced to some degree, but it had intensified) particularly about things beyond my control, and it was affecting my relationship with my partner. Fortunately, I found a brilliant therapist who helped me look deep into my heart and mind. By our second session, I had realised that my anxiety wasn't going to change the world around me or help anyone, especially myself; instead, it was completely undermining my enjoyment and happiness. The therapist was impressed with the courage I had shown to accept my truth and mentioned that many clients came to her for years while refusing to confront the root of their problems, which was often right in front of them. It's much easier to blame something or someone else for our pain. You are also spot on about politics: politicians know they're addressing a society suffering from complacency, dependency, and a lack of resilience.
Thank you, Otilia, your story adds vivid humanity to the essay’s ideas, and I’m grateful you shared it. Four sessions: short in time, massive in transformation. That’s the thing about real healing, it doesn’t always take years, sometimes it just takes one moment of radical honesty. And you had that moment. You looked, and that, in itself, is a form of bravery most people spend a lifetime avoiding.
I’m struck by your therapist’s observation, that many come for years and still won’t touch the root. That’s precisely the dance I was writing about: the refusal to truly engage, to take off the mask, to trade comfort for clarity. Because once you see the real cause, you’re accountable to it. And that’s terrifying. Naming the thing means you can’t unknow it. You can’t pretend it’s someone else’s fault anymore. That’s the threshold most never cross.
Your reflection on anxiety is deep. It’s not that anxiety doesn’t change the world, it’s that it tricks us into feeling like we’re doing something useful, when in fact we’re siphoning energy away from the very things that do bring meaning, joy, and connection. Anxiety is often pain pretending to be control but it’s a poor disguise, and an even worse life strategy.
As for your point on politics …. yes, yes, yes. Politicians have learned to parent the public rather than empower it. And it works, because dependency is comfortable. But real citizenship, like real healing, requires discomfort. It demands that we stop blaming and start building. That we confront not just what’s wrong out there, but what we’ve tolerated, enabled, or outsourced in here.
So thank you again! Your experience is a living example of the essay’s heartbeat: the quiet, courageous choice to stop circling the wound and finally step into it. Not to suffer, but to transform.
Do you know what was also interesting? The therapist 'released' me after our fourth session. Contrary to the myth that therapists only want to keep you coming back for financial gain, they are often quite busy and genuinely pleased when someone discovers their answers and is ready to live freely. At least mine was. She handed me two books to help me navigate my newfound truth and said goodbye, hoping never to see me again.
It's hard to decide what to do with your writing at times.... Like quicksand you don't want to get out of.
And yet, even in the apathy of letting go, we find aloe, a muse, a path, for growth.
Does our soul ever become amnesiac, ever recording until we have to reconcile?
And with the obvious glaring at us all, the relief we chase, instead of the bandaid, is in that exorcism of the gluttonous 'self' bloated on its own victimhood as you allude, and there is the cure.
As one of my teachers would say, we're happy to take, paracetamol for a headache that requires brain surgery.
Something must always die, for something else to grow.
And the most spiritually profound death of all, is the death of all that squawks like a crow....that incessant mind chatter disguised as intellectualisation, as thought, as intelligence.
Thank you, this is verbal magic. You’ve written a spiraling incantation of truth, grief, and something far more precious: surrender. Reading your words feels like descending into the psyche’s basement with a candle and finding poetry carved into the walls.
Your quicksand metaphor is perfect because that’s exactly how real introspection feels. Not a ladder but a letting-go. A submission to discomfort. And yes, paradoxically, even that apathy contains medicine — aloe, as you so evocatively put it. There’s softness in the fall, if we stop resisting the descent.
Your question “Does our soul ever become amnesiac?” stopped me. I think it does, not out of carelessness, but out of necessity. The soul forgets so the ego can survive. But healing begins the moment memory returns, not to the mind, but to the body. That’s when the real reconciliation begins. Not of events, but of identity. Not just what happened, but who we became in response.
And this line… “the gluttonous ‘self’ bloated on its own victimhood”…cuts deep. That’s the core of the disease. The ego’s infinite appetite for self-centered suffering. Not real pain, but performative, curated, familiar pain. We coddle it. We feed it metaphors. And when someone suggests we let it die, we call them cruel. But as your teacher said: paracetamol won’t do. This isn’t a headache, it’s a haunting.
The death of the squawking crow-mind, the chatter dressed in intellectual robes. Yes. It’s the false guru within. The one who sounds smart but never changes. The one who’d rather write essays about transformation than walk through its fire. You name it. You challenge it. And in doing so, you join the lineage of those rare few who are willing to die a thousand ego-deaths in pursuit of something quieter, truer, freer.
So no… this is not prattling. This is prophecy. And I’m grateful to be in the same conversation.
Summated succinctly in our responsibility in all of this... Just stop, and, 'YOU, name it'. Finally have the courage to bloody name it. Without it, there is no cure. Name it..... That will sit with me for days.
This is one of the most honest and sharp dissections of modern politics I’ve read in a long time, and it lands because it doesn’t flatter our illusions. The choice to frame political ideologies as “relief providers” rather than agents of actual cure is such a vital and brave insight. Because it’s true: most political platforms don’t ask citizens to change, they just promise to soothe their discomfort. Band-Aids over broken bones. Reforms that feel good but rarely do good.
What came to mind while reading this is how often we confuse symbolic politics with structural transformation. We applaud representation without questioning the systems those representatives operate within. We settle for moral victories on social media instead of confronting the deeply unglamorous work of institutional change. It’s emotional analgesia disguised as progress—and we’ve gotten hooked on the high.
Thank you for not just choosing this subject, but for exploring it with such layered depth, elegance, and fire. You didn’t write around the pain—you went into it, sat with it, and came back with something real. That’s rare. And it’s needed. Especially today!
Thank you, Céline! This left me feeling seen in the best way: not just as a writer, but as someone willing to dive into the mess and come back dripping, not sanitised. Your phrase “emotional analgesia disguised as progress” is so brilliant it should be carved into the marble of every parliamentary chamber. That’s exactly it. Politics, at its most performative, has become therapeutic theatre, spectacle over structure, catharsis over consequence.
And you nailed the deeper danger: symbolic politics posing as structural change. We cheer for representation like it’s revolution, forgetting that what matters isn’t who occupies the seat, but what the seat does. We let ourselves be lulled by identity-based wins that leave the underlying machinery untouched. It’s like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house with a crumbling foundation and calling it a renovation… look what’s happening everywhere in the world!
Your insight reminds me that the seduction of relief isn’t limited to individuals, it scales up!!! Whole electorates now crave the sensation of moral alignment more than the friction of real reform. Politicians know this, so they craft narratives of virtue rather than visions of change. They treat symptoms loudly while preserving causes quietly. And because we’re exhausted, overstimulated, and addicted to affirmation, we accept the anesthesia and call it agency.
But I believe, as your comment reflects, that the tide is turning. People start to feel the hollowness of symbolic victories. They’re hungry for something less flattering, more functional. The question is whether we have the stamina to stay disillusioned long enough to build something better, rather than rush back to the comfort of cosmetic change.
So thank you for reading with that kind of clarity, precision, and political courage. I wrote it hoping to provoke this exact kind of reckoning, not just with systems, but with ourselves!
Every answer you give to your readers is a little essay in itself. So wonderful, Tamara. Deep and always full of new ideas to be debated, developed and digested. Merci.
Thank you, Susan! What a delightfully right-brained compliment! That’s the highest praise a piece of writing can receive: not that it entertained, but that it expanded.
And you’ve hit on something subtle here, the experiential quality of wisdom. It’s not theoretical. It’s bone-deep. Wisdom, unlike knowledge, leaves scar tissue. It doesn’t live in the neocortex but somewhere between the heart and the gut, often earned the hard way. Maybe that’s why it resonates most with the right brain (the poetic, the symbolic, the nonlinear) the part of us that knows without calculating.
Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary considers the right brain is the master because of its experiential wisdom. Something you have already mastered. And you leave me breathless.
I love this distinction, especially because I feel like we live in a world where reliefs are often marketed and soled as ultimate cures. Even though cures are much harder to obtain, they're still more compelling than reliefs — after all, who doesn't want to go to Heaven? Hell is often more comfortable, but that's another story. We all aim upwards, consciously or not, and when we think we have the chance to get there quicker, we jump at the opportunity.
The loneliness you speak of is not only part of being cured, but of transformation itself — no loneliness is greater than that which hits you when you find yourself between two worlds, the one you knew and burned and the heaven promised. And I think that's what we fear most.
You’ve grasped the core tension I was wrestling with: the seductive mislabeling of “relief” as a cure, and the painful, liminal space of true transformation. Your line “no loneliness is greater than that which hits you when you find yourself between two worlds” is beautiful and true. That’s exactly it: not quite who you were, not yet who you’re becoming. That no-man’s-land is where most people turn back.
I appreciate your invocation of Heaven and Hell here, especially the idea that Hell is often more comfortable. That’s a line Dostoevsky would have admired. It’s so often the case that we conflate familiarity with safety, even when that familiarity is killing us slowly. Relief is comfortable. Cure is disorienting.
Of course you’re right: we do aim upwards, even unconsciously, but often without realising that elevation isn’t ascension. It’s excavation. You dig, not climb. You unearth, not transcend. The irony is that what we call “Heaven” often begins underground… in silence, in solitude, in the compost of our former selves.
One thought your comment stirred in me: perhaps the loneliness of transformation isn’t just about being between two worlds, but about realising how few people ever choose to cross at all. Not only that you’re between…. it’s that you’re watching others settle comfortably in the wreckage you just crawled out of.
And once you know what’s possible, you can’t unknow it. That’s the price of truth. But it’s also the first taste of freedom.
I do think Heaven *is* ascension, but the going into the depths is the precondition. When you've been comfortable your own life, you have no incentive to move upwards. This is the point where having something to run from becomes crucial, and you cannot see the monster chasing you if you do not turn your head back.
The loneliness doesn't necessarily come from the mere being of finding yourself in the in-between, but because you look around and see that there's nobody by your side. Or very few people. If you peek into your old world, seeing that nobody is following you can only make you sad, perhaps disheartened and aching to go back. Yet, you have to keep going, because there may not be many people at the start of the journey, but be damn sure there are plenty along the way. And, in the end, you're gonna be glad you kept going and got to meet them.
I think we’re very much aligned in seeing that the downward descent (into the shadow, into discomfort, into the unconscious) is the price of real elevation. Ascension without descent is just spiritual bypassing in a prettier outfit.
I like your phrasing: “you cannot see the monster chasing you if you do not turn your head back.” That’s a whole essay in itself. There’s existential courage required to look back, not with nostalgia, but with clarity. It’s almost mythic: Orpheus turning too soon, Lot’s wife looking back and turning to salt. But in our version, turning back isn’t the sin… refusing to is. Because without seeing the monster, you never truly know what you’ve outgrown.
And your vision of the path forward — that ache of looking back and seeing no one following — yes. That’s the heartbreak of healing. The absence of witnesses. It’s loneliness of course, but also bereavement. The grief of leaving behind not just people, but versions of yourself that once needed them. But your final line is gold: “there may not be many people at the start of the journey, but be damn sure there are plenty along the way.”
That’s the secret, isn’t it? Evolution creates new ecosystems. New frequencies attract different echoes. You lose the tribe of your trauma but find the kin of your becoming. And those are the ones who don’t just applaud your healing, they mirror your wholeness.
This is exactly what I needed to read today! I’ve continued to feel lost and sad even after I’ve spent time in nature, writing, reading, and caring for myself. All the “self-love” and “acceptance” talk is fluff and only a temporary bandaid. As you said, we have to deconstruct who we are, why we follow certain patterns, why we avoid or seek certain things or people, in order to understand the root cause of our suffering. That understanding will set us free - it will rewire our brain to change how we think and only then will true transformation begin.
I wonder if you can offer a practical method to start the transformation (when, where, how). Many of us want to cure but don’t know where to begin and don’t know if we are making progress. I assume not all inquiry is performed at once - there must be questions that need answering before deeper dive can begin.
Thank you for all you do! I am truly inspired by your words and generosity to all of us!
Thank you so much, MJ, your comment is alive with the kind of insight that only comes from actually doing the work, not just reading about it. I’m genuinely moved that the essay found you on a day you needed it most. That’s the quiet, strange magic of words… they travel through the void and arrive like an arrow to the place you didn’t even realise was bleeding.
And you’re absolutely right: the “self-love” and “acceptance” mantras, while well-intentioned, can easily become spiritual frosting: sweet, fluffy, and entirely incapable of nourishing a soul starved for truth. There’s nothing wrong with kindness toward the self — in fact, it’s necessary. But without rigour, kindness becomes a sedative. Real healing is less like a spa day and more like a controlled demolition.
To your question (and it’s a brilliant one) yes, transformation doesn’t begin with a leap, it begins with a lens. The first practical method I would offer is deceptively simple: start by noticing what you defend. When do you get irritated? What stories do you insist are “just how it is”? What makes you say, “But that’s just me”? That’s where the gold is. Your ego hides in your certainties.
From there, I often suggest creating a “Pattern Inventory” — a private list of recurring emotional experiences, especially the uncomfortable ones: abandonment, comparison, invisibility, resentment, chronic over-giving, etc. Trace them. Where do they come from? Who do they sound like? What do they cost you? You don’t need to fix them yet. You just need to see the map.
You’re right, not all inquiry can happen at once. The psyche has its own pacing. You don’t rip all the wallpaper off at once, you peel one corner and see what’s underneath. And sometimes, just naming the pattern is enough to start the neural rewiring. Because the brain can’t change what it’s busy justifying.
Progress, in this space, rarely looks like “feeling better.” It looks like feeling more clearly. Less numbing, more nuance. Less chaos, more choice. And eventually — the quiet realisation that your story is no longer running you. You’re running it!!!
Thank you again for your generous words! If anything I write helps light even a flicker of clarity, I consider that the real reward.
These questions are great starters, and the model overall makes a lot of sense. I particularly liked tracing the patterns (i.e. when do we get upset, when are we inclined to dismiss the boundaries, etc). Thank you for sharing!!! I also love your idea that the ultimate goal is for us to run our story vs the other way around. That’s a profound way of looking at transformation. I took away lots of golden nuggets from you, not just from the essay but through conversation. Thank you, as always, for making the time to acknowledge and respond - it is appreciated more than you know!
My husband’s entire family is in thrall to the narrative their mother spins about why her marriage was so terrible and thus, why their growing up years were so awful. The stories we tell ourselves about the things that have happened to us can make or break our lives.
Thank you for sharing this, I can feel the weight of it between your words, and the complex ache of watching people you care about remain ensnared in someone else’s unresolved narrative. That’s one of the hardest dynamics to witness: when the story that shaped someone’s pain becomes the script they never stop performing or questioning.
You’re right: the stories we tell ourselves can either liberate us or sentence us to a life lived in circles. And when those stories are inherited (shaped by a parent’s pain, distorted by their wounds) they can become a kind of generational spell. One that feels like truth because it was told to you by someone who should have known it.
What makes this even harder, I imagine, is that the mother’s narrative probably holds some truth… but selectively. It’s not always the lies that bind us most tightly, but the partial truths. The emotionally charged edits that preserve identity at the expense of clarity. When that becomes the family gospel, questioning it can feel like betrayal, even when it’s the only path to freedom.
I’m holding a lot of empathy for you in this. You clearly see the cycle, and you also see what’s possible beyond it. That kind of clarity can be lonely, but it’s also the first step in not passing that story on.
So may we all learn to pause, reflect, and ask: Is this a story I’m still living? Or one I’m finally ready to rewrite?
Beautiful!! I will be re-reading this, as I do many of your essays. You have a gift, Tamara! Maybe it is cultivated after a lot of practice, or maybe you just have *it*.
Have you heard of Vipassana, an Indian meditation technique? They have these 10-day (and longer) meditation courses (free of cost) where you're meant to observe a strict code of discipline, including observation of silence throughout. No phones obviously, not even books or a scrap of paper to write on, no working out, not even yoga, and light meals only. I have heard of many people feeling a lot of catharsis through this course because they just had to face their worst inner demons; there was no "relief" or distraction. Just being with yourself. The practice of Vipassana, particularly this course, came to my mind while reading this.
I'm really curious to know a little bit about your choice of topics, how you come to them, which ones you choose to write on, and who are some of the authors/thinkers you enjoy reading?
Thank you, what a generous, thoughtful comment. That’s the highest compliment: rereading my work.
And yes, I know about Vipassana, I have Indian friends and that’s how I heard about it a long time ago. That technique, that discipline, is such a powerful embodiment of exactly what this essay explores. No distractions. No external anchors. Just you, your breath, and everything you’ve tried to bury. Ten days with no relief, only raw presence. It’s more than a retreat, it’s a confrontation. And I can imagine why so many experience it as both catharsis and crucible. It’s the clearest possible proof that healing doesn’t happen in noise, but in silence that doesn’t let you hide.
As for your question — I love that you asked. My inspiration comes in different forms. Everything can move me if I’m paying attention. Sometimes it’s something I see happen in the life of someone I love. Sometimes it’s a passing sentence in a book, a line in a song, an old scar in myself, or something stirred from what I call my last life, the emotional memory of who I once was, and what she still whispers.
Often, I don’t choose the topic so much as it chooses me. It shows up. Sits with me. Insists. I’ve learned not to force themes, but to listen, to let the question reveal itself, and then chase it with the sharpest blade I can find.
As for writers and thinkers…. the list shifts like tides. But I’d mention a lot of poets, I read a lot of poetry, then Tolkien, Joyce, Robert Musil, Rushdie, Proust, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, Foucault, Joseph Campbell, Bertrand Russell, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, bell hooks, Carl Jung, Annie Dillard, Octavia Butler… too many to mention all. People who wrote not just to say something, but to see something — and to make others see it too, even if it hurt. Especially if it hurt.
Thank you again for being here, and for asking such a beautiful question. It’s readers like you who make me want to keep answering.
Thank you for responding to the question in such detail. And I love how you describe your creative process, especially the idea of letting the question reveal itself. Grateful for your words and your presence here. Learning a lot :)
Wow.. very insightful and true.. facing our own truths...inspire of fear of the unknown..rather than playing to feelings, however justified by conditioning, that keep us codependent on a fraudulent version of ourselves..trapped in a low vibrational reality, which attracts more suffering, rather than dissolving / transcending it for good.. The search for the truth will expose all parts of you, like sailing through a storm...rather than going around it.. to find the perspective and reality viewed from the stillness of the eye in the middle..but from a 1000 feet above
Thank you, you captured something essential: that facing the truth is not just uncomfortable, it’s destabilising, especially when we’ve spent years building identities on adaptations that once kept us safe. But as you put it, those adaptations can easily become the cage — a fraudulent version of ourselves that feels familiar but keeps us vibrating at the frequency of suffering.
That metaphor (sailing through the storm rather than around it) is exactly what transformation demands. No detours, no spiritual bypass, just the raw, disorienting work of letting every illusion be stripped by the wind. Because only then do we reach what you describe so powerfully: the stillness at the center, and the perspective from 1,000 feet above.
I’ve suffered narcissistic abuse from my father, which shattered my authentic self. For years, I didn’t know who I truly was. When I finally realized it, I blamed and cursed my father. I wept, felt terrible, became depressed, hopeless, and afraid of everything.
I don’t know whether I’ve healed or not—maybe I’m still in the healing process. But I do know this: I journal my thoughts, and I’ve confided in a close friend about what I felt in that relationship. Gradually, I began reclaiming my old self.
I don’t talk much about it now. I look at my past self with compassion. I haven’t forgiven my father, but I no longer get triggered by the things he planted in my mind.
Now, I take responsibility for my actions and my life. I don’t resent or blame anymore. I just live in the moment. When I compare my present to the past, it feels completely different.
This man—me—is strong. He is free to do what he wants. The one who once couldn’t make friends now has healthy social relationships. Everything is different. I’m reclaiming the person I once was.
Thank you for this, for your honesty, for your strength, and for letting your truth breathe here. What you’ve written is more than a simple comment, it is a testament. You’ve walked through fire and emerged yourself, not untouched, not unscarred, but real.
The way you describe your journey, from confusion to clarity, from rage to responsibility, is deeply moving. You didn’t bypass the pain. You sat with it. Wept with it. Faced it. That, to me, is healing, even if you don’t feel “finished.” Because healing isn’t a polished ending, it is a reclaimed beginning. And you are in it, fully.
What you said about not knowing whether you’ve healed… that’s such an important point. Healing often doesn’t feel like fireworks or clarity. Sometimes, it feels like what you described: a quieter nervous system, a softer heart toward your former self, a life that doesn’t revolve around survival anymore. That is transformation, even if it doesn’t wear a crown.
You may not have forgiven your father, and you don’t have to. Forgiveness isn’t a performance or a spiritual checkbox. Sometimes, not being triggered is the loudest form of liberation. When the voice that once ruled your inner world grows silent, you become the authority. That is a form of resurrection.
And this man you speak of now — the one with friends, with agency, with peace — he is the proof. Not that the past didn’t wound, but that it didn’t win.
So keep reclaiming. Not just who you once were, but everything you never had the chance to be. That’s where your story lives now… not in blame, not in fear, but in freedom.
Disturbingly original. Here I am trying to recall a play which eg Shakespeare might have written along a similar theme, but cannot, at the moment, although many hint at it.
It seems to me that courage is what’s needed, to change one’s habitual approach to life.
Could it be that, in this Holy Week, it is Jesus, who chose to follow His father’s will, underwent the most transformative change of any man in history.
Any change we might seek to endure cannot be as severe as His, because physical resurrection is not available to us. That offers some reassurance.
Thank you, “disturbingly original” might be my new favourite compliment. And your comment brings such a rich, historical-spiritual depth to the conversation. You’re right: courage is the hinge. It’s not only pain itself that transforms us, it’s the willingness to move through it consciously, to confront the known self and still choose the unknown path. That’s where change begins.
And your invocation of Jesus during Holy Week feels especially poignant for me. He didn’t just experience transformation, He embodied the cost of it. Betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, physical agony… and still, He walked forward. Not in pursuit of comfort, but of purpose. Not to preserve identity, but to fulfill it through obliteration. There is no greater metaphor for my essay’s idea that true cures require death (of the self, the ego, the narrative) before any resurrection is possible.
You’re also right to point out that we don’t get the literal resurrection. But perhaps what we do get is a symbolic one — one that happens over and over in a lifetime. Each time we let a part of ourselves die (pride, illusion, bitterness) something quieter, purer, more free takes its place. We may not rise from tombs, but we do rise from grief, from endings, from truths that once felt like crucifixions.
So yes, your comment is both grounding and galvanising. It reminds me that spiritual traditions, at their deepest level, aren’t about doctrine, but about process. And in that way, Christ’s journey is not just historical. It’s archetypal. It’s the story of all who choose truth over comfort, surrender over safety, and meaning over survival.
Thank you again for framing it with such grace and reverence!
Thanks for your prudent advice. I doubt I’ll intentionally cease to follow you, as your essays are outstanding, & your generous, prompt & considered responses rare in these days of extreme brevity.
Thankyou indeed. Your referring to us letting a part of ourselves die (pride, illusion, bitterness), reminds me of Confession in the Roman Catholic Church, which provides a simplified means of overcoming our weaknesses. We could view them as ‘sins’. But they often recur. More like relief than cure.
The major issues I face now are principally the deaths over the last few years of most of my immediate family, & the loss of much money through real estate transactions, having been given the wrong advice. We sold properties here in Australia to move Britain or Poland, to be closer to family, but for many reasons couldn’t move there. Now I wish to do so, not only have more family died, but the political & economic situation has deteriorated. And I cannot afford the property we had here, were it for sale. One reason I’m not a paying subscriber to you, yet.
Thank you again for such an honest, tender reply. You’ve woven together spiritual reflection and real-life grief with a kind of dignity that deeply moves me. I’m so sorry for what you’ve endured, the compounded losses of family, security, and direction. When grief and regret intertwine, it can feel like time is folding in on itself, as though choices made in the past are haunting the present, and the future feels like a door that keeps shifting further out of reach.
Your reference to Confession struck me. Yes — it’s a ritual of release, but as you so insightfully noted, it often becomes more about relief than cure. That’s not a failure of the practice itself, but of our humanity. We return again and again because healing isn’t linear, and forgiveness (especially of ourselves) often arrives in layers, not thunderclaps.
What you’re facing now is circumstantial hardship,,the ache of dislocation, the rupture of plans that once held meaning, and the very adult pain of knowing that even well-intentioned decisions can leave us stranded. There’s no quick balm for that. But if I can offer anything, it’s this: don’t confuse being stuck with being finished. Life has a way, maddening, miraculous, of bending back toward possibility, even when the road seems too splintered to walk.
And please, don’t ever apologise for not being a paying subscriber. Your presence, your thoughtfulness, your honesty… that’s the real currency here. You’ve already given far more than most by simply showing up and sharing so generously.
One small piece of advice, if I may: in moments when everything external feels lost or out of place, try to anchor to something internal that can’t be taken. A daily ritual, a walk, a book, a conversation that reminds you of your own rootedness. That is what I do. Home, after all, isn’t always geography. Sometimes it’s made of words, memories, and the quiet decision to keep going.
I’m deeply honoured you’re here. And I hope you’ll continue to be.
Wow. This was a surgical strike on the soul, and I say that with deep gratitude.
Reading this felt like someone finally articulated the tension I’ve lived but never quite named: the quiet ache of wanting to be free while still clutching the comfort of my suffering. I’ve been there, journaling breakthroughs, therapy epiphanies, even leading workshops, all while avoiding the real work of dismantling the identity built around my pain. It’s sobering to realize how seductive the performance of healing can be, and how much more radical and lonely actual transformation is.
Your distinction between relief and cure… it hit like truth. Like when I finally left a toxic relationship — not just the person, but the story I told myself about why I stayed. That moment was cathartic, excruciating. It felt like I was mourning not just love, but the self I had contorted to preserve it. And yes there was a death in that. And a strange, unsettling freedom after.
Thank you for writing something that doesn't coddle, but cuts in the best way. It’s rare to read something this honest, this piercing, and still feel held by it. This is insight. This is a mirror, and a call.
Truly, thank you.
Thank you, Alexander, this is the kind of answer that makes writing worth the burn.
“The quiet ache of wanting to be free while still clutching the comfort of my suffering” is devastatingly accurate. That’s the soul’s tug-of-war. The paradox of craving liberation while still romanticising the cage. Because sometimes the bars feel like bones: they’re ours, we grew around them, they hold us up. Letting them go can feel like disintegration, not healing.
What you described (the journaling, the workshops, the curated “breakthroughs”) that’s the performance of healing. The spiritual pageantry we all fall into at some point, where we simulate transformation just enough to feel the high, but not so deeply that it demands real loss. And loss is the cost of truth. You nailed that with your story about leaving the toxic relationship… not just the person, but the story. That’s where the real severing happens. You don’t just lose the other. You lose you, the version of you that made the pain make sense.
And that strange, unsettling freedom? That’s the new terrain. No maps. No audience. Just you : raw, unmasked, reborn. The silence there can be deafening, but also holy. Because that’s where your real voice starts to speak.
I’m deeply honoured the essay served as mirror and call. You remind me that it’s not enough to write beautifully…… it must wound beautifully, too. Not to harm, but to release. Like lancing a wound that’s been festering behind all that self-awareness. So again, thank you for being the kind of reader who doesn’t flinch from the knife, but understands it’s a tool for freedom.
I am grateful I have the most amazing subscribers!
Your answer landed like a blessing and a challenge all at once, and I mean that with the deepest respect.
It sounds sacred: “the bars feel like bones.” God, yes. That line alone stopped me. Because it captures so precisely that awful intimacy we have with our own cages, how they don’t just confine us, they define us. We build meaning around them. Identity. Relationships. Careers, even. And when we start pulling at the bars, we escape. But we also confront the terrifying possibility that we won’t recognize ourselves without them.
Your words about the “spiritual pageantry” felt uncomfortably familiar but in a good way. Like being caught in a lie I didn’t know I was still telling myself. Because you’re right: we can curate growth just enough to feel virtuous, without ever risking the vertigo of real transformation. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough, that healing, real healing, doesn’t feel like a glow-up. It feels like demolition.
And yet, somehow, your words hold space for that destruction with reverence, not fear. That’s rare. That’s why your writing consecrates. It makes the pain holy. It names the cost of becoming free, but it also reminds us that freedom is still worth it, even if it costs us everything we thought we were.
So thank you not just for the essay, but for seeing my response not as flattery, but as kinship. As someone who’s walked through the fire and is still peeling off the ash, your words met me.
Grateful to be in this kind of dialogue. The world needs more of it.
Relief becomes the ultimate disease if you manage to numb yourself to death.
We are wired for short-term measures because they conserve energy and get us through the "now", which is very useful for survival and for compelling immediate action, but is very bad for long-term planning, growth and evolution.
At every moment we're faced with making decisions about whether we spend now and pay later, or pay now to give our future selves the dividends. It's a risk either way, because you could be saving for a retirement that a random drunk driver or some unexpected disease will rob you out of, or you can take it all now and set yourself up for 50 years of regret.
The ever-presence of opportunity costs. The real problem, which you identified, is that instead of weighing these costs, we live in a society that now pushes the "YOLO" paradigm. We've developed an unhealthy obsession with deferring the costs of the present onto the future, and it's incredibly unsettling, with a cure that might just be too much for us to bear.
Brilliant and haunting, Tamara. Thank you.
I am deeply grateful for the way you extend the argument of my essay into the realm of time, risk, and cost. “Relief becomes the ultimate disease if you manage to numb yourself to death” — that’s an epitaph for a whole generation that’s been taught to trade presence for performance, and resilience for relief.
You zero in on something profoundly under-discussed: the neurobiology of survival vs. the philosophy of becoming. Our brains are wired for short-term fixes, evolution didn’t gift us dopamine for delayed gratification. We are built to get through the day, not transcend the decade. Which is why transformation often feels like a betrayal of instinct. It’s not only hard — it’s unnatural. It requires overriding the very systems that kept us alive, just to build a life worth living.
And your point about opportunity cost is so sharp, we’re constantly running a psychic ledger. But instead of doing the hard math, we outsource it to slogans. YOLO. Treat yourself. You deserve this. It’s not self-care, it’s self-sabotage in a bathrobe. Pathetic!
What struck me most is your suggestion that the cure might be too much to bear. That’s the haunting part. Because you’re right: to really see what relief has cost us (spiritually, emotionally, collectively) is to stand at the edge of an abyss. And the tragedy is, some would rather dive into another distraction than face that view.
But I still believe there’s hope… Because if we can name the disease (numbed living, postponed existence) then maybe we are already halfway to the cure? The real defiance now isn’t hedonism, it’s depth. It’s discipline. It’s choosing the long game in a world allergic to patience. And the rare few who do? They don’t just survive time. They transcend it!
Perfect, as always. Couldn't have said any of that better.
Yes, you could! It’s enough for anyone to read your essays to understand it.
What are the conditions required for one to be able to override the neurobiology of survival in order to transform? You mention some - presence, resilience. I think some people think they are doing the real work in relief, and is it our job to say that’s not good enough if it works for them?
As you mention relief as a stepping stone can be useful. Since transformation is contrary to our nature having certain conditions met first allowing you to override the system might be necessary? I’m not sure if this is true or not. And if those conditions are in over abundance the desire for transformation may be mute because you are drowning in the bliss of relief. While still worthwhile, what would drive someone to disrupt the system.
While i feel as though you have written the words out of my brain i find myself wondering how much we over index on transformation vs just living.
Thanks for this great piece. I am new here and finding my way around.
You’ve posed the essential question: what are the conditions under which transformation becomes possible (or even desirable) given that it runs counter to our neurobiology? You’re right to suggest that relief isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes, it’s the stretcher that carries us out of the fire. But as with morphine, the dose that numbs pain can, when prolonged, kill sensation itself. Relief, if mistaken for recovery, becomes a velvet coffin.
You also touch on something vital: not everyone who rests is retreating. There are seasons of healing where presence is too much, and resilience is still loading. But the danger is mistaking intermission for arrival. Not all comfort is cozy… some of it is chloroform.
Your question — “who are we to say that relief isn’t good enough if it works for them?” — deserves nuance in my opinion. Here’s the thing: we shouldn’t go around yanking the blankets off people mid-hibernation. But we can ask: “What do you mean by ‘working’?” If “working” means quieting symptoms while the root system rots…. is that success, or just sedation? I don’t think it’s judgmental to ask whether someone is building shelter or just digging a very elaborate hole.
As for the conditions that allow us to override the survival drive: they’re paradoxical. You need enough safety to tolerate the risk of change, but not so much comfort that change feels unnecessary. It’s a tightrope walk between desperation and sedation. Transformation is often born at the precise point where what once soothed you starts to suffocate you.
And yes, maybe we do over-index on transformation. Especially in a culture that packages growth as content. But my sense is that what we long for isn’t constant reinvention, but integration. To become someone who doesn’t flinch at their own depth. Who isn’t held hostage by yesterday’s coping mechanisms. Who dares to ask not “What will keep me going?” but “What is worth going toward?”
Ultimately, I don’t think the call to transcend survival is moralistic. It’s existential. It’s not that we should transform, but that we ache to. Even when we pretend not to. Even when we bargain with the bathrobe.
Because the truth is: survival is compulsory. Becoming is optional. But those who choose it? They are the authors of their own evolution, and that, I believe, is the fiercest form of freedom.
Thank you for your comment and questions, Bryanna!
Your text reminded me of the four therapy sessions I had a few years ago. I was extremely anxious (something I had always experienced to some degree, but it had intensified) particularly about things beyond my control, and it was affecting my relationship with my partner. Fortunately, I found a brilliant therapist who helped me look deep into my heart and mind. By our second session, I had realised that my anxiety wasn't going to change the world around me or help anyone, especially myself; instead, it was completely undermining my enjoyment and happiness. The therapist was impressed with the courage I had shown to accept my truth and mentioned that many clients came to her for years while refusing to confront the root of their problems, which was often right in front of them. It's much easier to blame something or someone else for our pain. You are also spot on about politics: politicians know they're addressing a society suffering from complacency, dependency, and a lack of resilience.
Thank you, Otilia, your story adds vivid humanity to the essay’s ideas, and I’m grateful you shared it. Four sessions: short in time, massive in transformation. That’s the thing about real healing, it doesn’t always take years, sometimes it just takes one moment of radical honesty. And you had that moment. You looked, and that, in itself, is a form of bravery most people spend a lifetime avoiding.
I’m struck by your therapist’s observation, that many come for years and still won’t touch the root. That’s precisely the dance I was writing about: the refusal to truly engage, to take off the mask, to trade comfort for clarity. Because once you see the real cause, you’re accountable to it. And that’s terrifying. Naming the thing means you can’t unknow it. You can’t pretend it’s someone else’s fault anymore. That’s the threshold most never cross.
Your reflection on anxiety is deep. It’s not that anxiety doesn’t change the world, it’s that it tricks us into feeling like we’re doing something useful, when in fact we’re siphoning energy away from the very things that do bring meaning, joy, and connection. Anxiety is often pain pretending to be control but it’s a poor disguise, and an even worse life strategy.
As for your point on politics …. yes, yes, yes. Politicians have learned to parent the public rather than empower it. And it works, because dependency is comfortable. But real citizenship, like real healing, requires discomfort. It demands that we stop blaming and start building. That we confront not just what’s wrong out there, but what we’ve tolerated, enabled, or outsourced in here.
So thank you again! Your experience is a living example of the essay’s heartbeat: the quiet, courageous choice to stop circling the wound and finally step into it. Not to suffer, but to transform.
Do you know what was also interesting? The therapist 'released' me after our fourth session. Contrary to the myth that therapists only want to keep you coming back for financial gain, they are often quite busy and genuinely pleased when someone discovers their answers and is ready to live freely. At least mine was. She handed me two books to help me navigate my newfound truth and said goodbye, hoping never to see me again.
Thant sounds like the best therapist. That’s what the good ones should do!
It's hard to decide what to do with your writing at times.... Like quicksand you don't want to get out of.
And yet, even in the apathy of letting go, we find aloe, a muse, a path, for growth.
Does our soul ever become amnesiac, ever recording until we have to reconcile?
And with the obvious glaring at us all, the relief we chase, instead of the bandaid, is in that exorcism of the gluttonous 'self' bloated on its own victimhood as you allude, and there is the cure.
As one of my teachers would say, we're happy to take, paracetamol for a headache that requires brain surgery.
Something must always die, for something else to grow.
And the most spiritually profound death of all, is the death of all that squawks like a crow....that incessant mind chatter disguised as intellectualisation, as thought, as intelligence.
Maybe this is even my prattling and verbal vomit.
Thank you, this is verbal magic. You’ve written a spiraling incantation of truth, grief, and something far more precious: surrender. Reading your words feels like descending into the psyche’s basement with a candle and finding poetry carved into the walls.
Your quicksand metaphor is perfect because that’s exactly how real introspection feels. Not a ladder but a letting-go. A submission to discomfort. And yes, paradoxically, even that apathy contains medicine — aloe, as you so evocatively put it. There’s softness in the fall, if we stop resisting the descent.
Your question “Does our soul ever become amnesiac?” stopped me. I think it does, not out of carelessness, but out of necessity. The soul forgets so the ego can survive. But healing begins the moment memory returns, not to the mind, but to the body. That’s when the real reconciliation begins. Not of events, but of identity. Not just what happened, but who we became in response.
And this line… “the gluttonous ‘self’ bloated on its own victimhood”…cuts deep. That’s the core of the disease. The ego’s infinite appetite for self-centered suffering. Not real pain, but performative, curated, familiar pain. We coddle it. We feed it metaphors. And when someone suggests we let it die, we call them cruel. But as your teacher said: paracetamol won’t do. This isn’t a headache, it’s a haunting.
The death of the squawking crow-mind, the chatter dressed in intellectual robes. Yes. It’s the false guru within. The one who sounds smart but never changes. The one who’d rather write essays about transformation than walk through its fire. You name it. You challenge it. And in doing so, you join the lineage of those rare few who are willing to die a thousand ego-deaths in pursuit of something quieter, truer, freer.
So no… this is not prattling. This is prophecy. And I’m grateful to be in the same conversation.
Summated succinctly in our responsibility in all of this... Just stop, and, 'YOU, name it'. Finally have the courage to bloody name it. Without it, there is no cure. Name it..... That will sit with me for days.
This is one of the most honest and sharp dissections of modern politics I’ve read in a long time, and it lands because it doesn’t flatter our illusions. The choice to frame political ideologies as “relief providers” rather than agents of actual cure is such a vital and brave insight. Because it’s true: most political platforms don’t ask citizens to change, they just promise to soothe their discomfort. Band-Aids over broken bones. Reforms that feel good but rarely do good.
What came to mind while reading this is how often we confuse symbolic politics with structural transformation. We applaud representation without questioning the systems those representatives operate within. We settle for moral victories on social media instead of confronting the deeply unglamorous work of institutional change. It’s emotional analgesia disguised as progress—and we’ve gotten hooked on the high.
Thank you for not just choosing this subject, but for exploring it with such layered depth, elegance, and fire. You didn’t write around the pain—you went into it, sat with it, and came back with something real. That’s rare. And it’s needed. Especially today!
Bravo, Tamara.
Thank you, Céline! This left me feeling seen in the best way: not just as a writer, but as someone willing to dive into the mess and come back dripping, not sanitised. Your phrase “emotional analgesia disguised as progress” is so brilliant it should be carved into the marble of every parliamentary chamber. That’s exactly it. Politics, at its most performative, has become therapeutic theatre, spectacle over structure, catharsis over consequence.
And you nailed the deeper danger: symbolic politics posing as structural change. We cheer for representation like it’s revolution, forgetting that what matters isn’t who occupies the seat, but what the seat does. We let ourselves be lulled by identity-based wins that leave the underlying machinery untouched. It’s like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house with a crumbling foundation and calling it a renovation… look what’s happening everywhere in the world!
Your insight reminds me that the seduction of relief isn’t limited to individuals, it scales up!!! Whole electorates now crave the sensation of moral alignment more than the friction of real reform. Politicians know this, so they craft narratives of virtue rather than visions of change. They treat symptoms loudly while preserving causes quietly. And because we’re exhausted, overstimulated, and addicted to affirmation, we accept the anesthesia and call it agency.
But I believe, as your comment reflects, that the tide is turning. People start to feel the hollowness of symbolic victories. They’re hungry for something less flattering, more functional. The question is whether we have the stamina to stay disillusioned long enough to build something better, rather than rush back to the comfort of cosmetic change.
So thank you for reading with that kind of clarity, precision, and political courage. I wrote it hoping to provoke this exact kind of reckoning, not just with systems, but with ourselves!
Every answer you give to your readers is a little essay in itself. So wonderful, Tamara. Deep and always full of new ideas to be debated, developed and digested. Merci.
I love dialogue. That’s all.
Yes to all of this Celine!
Thank you!
My brain, especially my right brain, feels larger because of your experiential wisdom.
Thank you, Susan! What a delightfully right-brained compliment! That’s the highest praise a piece of writing can receive: not that it entertained, but that it expanded.
And you’ve hit on something subtle here, the experiential quality of wisdom. It’s not theoretical. It’s bone-deep. Wisdom, unlike knowledge, leaves scar tissue. It doesn’t live in the neocortex but somewhere between the heart and the gut, often earned the hard way. Maybe that’s why it resonates most with the right brain (the poetic, the symbolic, the nonlinear) the part of us that knows without calculating.
Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and his Emissary considers the right brain is the master because of its experiential wisdom. Something you have already mastered. And you leave me breathless.
I love this distinction, especially because I feel like we live in a world where reliefs are often marketed and soled as ultimate cures. Even though cures are much harder to obtain, they're still more compelling than reliefs — after all, who doesn't want to go to Heaven? Hell is often more comfortable, but that's another story. We all aim upwards, consciously or not, and when we think we have the chance to get there quicker, we jump at the opportunity.
The loneliness you speak of is not only part of being cured, but of transformation itself — no loneliness is greater than that which hits you when you find yourself between two worlds, the one you knew and burned and the heaven promised. And I think that's what we fear most.
You’ve grasped the core tension I was wrestling with: the seductive mislabeling of “relief” as a cure, and the painful, liminal space of true transformation. Your line “no loneliness is greater than that which hits you when you find yourself between two worlds” is beautiful and true. That’s exactly it: not quite who you were, not yet who you’re becoming. That no-man’s-land is where most people turn back.
I appreciate your invocation of Heaven and Hell here, especially the idea that Hell is often more comfortable. That’s a line Dostoevsky would have admired. It’s so often the case that we conflate familiarity with safety, even when that familiarity is killing us slowly. Relief is comfortable. Cure is disorienting.
Of course you’re right: we do aim upwards, even unconsciously, but often without realising that elevation isn’t ascension. It’s excavation. You dig, not climb. You unearth, not transcend. The irony is that what we call “Heaven” often begins underground… in silence, in solitude, in the compost of our former selves.
One thought your comment stirred in me: perhaps the loneliness of transformation isn’t just about being between two worlds, but about realising how few people ever choose to cross at all. Not only that you’re between…. it’s that you’re watching others settle comfortably in the wreckage you just crawled out of.
And once you know what’s possible, you can’t unknow it. That’s the price of truth. But it’s also the first taste of freedom.
I do think Heaven *is* ascension, but the going into the depths is the precondition. When you've been comfortable your own life, you have no incentive to move upwards. This is the point where having something to run from becomes crucial, and you cannot see the monster chasing you if you do not turn your head back.
The loneliness doesn't necessarily come from the mere being of finding yourself in the in-between, but because you look around and see that there's nobody by your side. Or very few people. If you peek into your old world, seeing that nobody is following you can only make you sad, perhaps disheartened and aching to go back. Yet, you have to keep going, because there may not be many people at the start of the journey, but be damn sure there are plenty along the way. And, in the end, you're gonna be glad you kept going and got to meet them.
I think we’re very much aligned in seeing that the downward descent (into the shadow, into discomfort, into the unconscious) is the price of real elevation. Ascension without descent is just spiritual bypassing in a prettier outfit.
I like your phrasing: “you cannot see the monster chasing you if you do not turn your head back.” That’s a whole essay in itself. There’s existential courage required to look back, not with nostalgia, but with clarity. It’s almost mythic: Orpheus turning too soon, Lot’s wife looking back and turning to salt. But in our version, turning back isn’t the sin… refusing to is. Because without seeing the monster, you never truly know what you’ve outgrown.
And your vision of the path forward — that ache of looking back and seeing no one following — yes. That’s the heartbreak of healing. The absence of witnesses. It’s loneliness of course, but also bereavement. The grief of leaving behind not just people, but versions of yourself that once needed them. But your final line is gold: “there may not be many people at the start of the journey, but be damn sure there are plenty along the way.”
That’s the secret, isn’t it? Evolution creates new ecosystems. New frequencies attract different echoes. You lose the tribe of your trauma but find the kin of your becoming. And those are the ones who don’t just applaud your healing, they mirror your wholeness.
Your essays leave me in tears very often. Thank you! Truth hurts, but you put it so beautifully.
Thank you too! Yes… truth hurts….
This is exactly what I needed to read today! I’ve continued to feel lost and sad even after I’ve spent time in nature, writing, reading, and caring for myself. All the “self-love” and “acceptance” talk is fluff and only a temporary bandaid. As you said, we have to deconstruct who we are, why we follow certain patterns, why we avoid or seek certain things or people, in order to understand the root cause of our suffering. That understanding will set us free - it will rewire our brain to change how we think and only then will true transformation begin.
I wonder if you can offer a practical method to start the transformation (when, where, how). Many of us want to cure but don’t know where to begin and don’t know if we are making progress. I assume not all inquiry is performed at once - there must be questions that need answering before deeper dive can begin.
Thank you for all you do! I am truly inspired by your words and generosity to all of us!
Thank you so much, MJ, your comment is alive with the kind of insight that only comes from actually doing the work, not just reading about it. I’m genuinely moved that the essay found you on a day you needed it most. That’s the quiet, strange magic of words… they travel through the void and arrive like an arrow to the place you didn’t even realise was bleeding.
And you’re absolutely right: the “self-love” and “acceptance” mantras, while well-intentioned, can easily become spiritual frosting: sweet, fluffy, and entirely incapable of nourishing a soul starved for truth. There’s nothing wrong with kindness toward the self — in fact, it’s necessary. But without rigour, kindness becomes a sedative. Real healing is less like a spa day and more like a controlled demolition.
To your question (and it’s a brilliant one) yes, transformation doesn’t begin with a leap, it begins with a lens. The first practical method I would offer is deceptively simple: start by noticing what you defend. When do you get irritated? What stories do you insist are “just how it is”? What makes you say, “But that’s just me”? That’s where the gold is. Your ego hides in your certainties.
From there, I often suggest creating a “Pattern Inventory” — a private list of recurring emotional experiences, especially the uncomfortable ones: abandonment, comparison, invisibility, resentment, chronic over-giving, etc. Trace them. Where do they come from? Who do they sound like? What do they cost you? You don’t need to fix them yet. You just need to see the map.
You’re right, not all inquiry can happen at once. The psyche has its own pacing. You don’t rip all the wallpaper off at once, you peel one corner and see what’s underneath. And sometimes, just naming the pattern is enough to start the neural rewiring. Because the brain can’t change what it’s busy justifying.
Progress, in this space, rarely looks like “feeling better.” It looks like feeling more clearly. Less numbing, more nuance. Less chaos, more choice. And eventually — the quiet realisation that your story is no longer running you. You’re running it!!!
Thank you again for your generous words! If anything I write helps light even a flicker of clarity, I consider that the real reward.
These questions are great starters, and the model overall makes a lot of sense. I particularly liked tracing the patterns (i.e. when do we get upset, when are we inclined to dismiss the boundaries, etc). Thank you for sharing!!! I also love your idea that the ultimate goal is for us to run our story vs the other way around. That’s a profound way of looking at transformation. I took away lots of golden nuggets from you, not just from the essay but through conversation. Thank you, as always, for making the time to acknowledge and respond - it is appreciated more than you know!
Thank YOU, MJ!
Ouch. Your words cut deep, striping back the layers of flesh, revealing the true wounds buried underneath - the ones we would rather remain hidden.
You got to the very heart of it! You understood it and felt it! Thank you!
My husband’s entire family is in thrall to the narrative their mother spins about why her marriage was so terrible and thus, why their growing up years were so awful. The stories we tell ourselves about the things that have happened to us can make or break our lives.
Thank you for sharing this, I can feel the weight of it between your words, and the complex ache of watching people you care about remain ensnared in someone else’s unresolved narrative. That’s one of the hardest dynamics to witness: when the story that shaped someone’s pain becomes the script they never stop performing or questioning.
You’re right: the stories we tell ourselves can either liberate us or sentence us to a life lived in circles. And when those stories are inherited (shaped by a parent’s pain, distorted by their wounds) they can become a kind of generational spell. One that feels like truth because it was told to you by someone who should have known it.
What makes this even harder, I imagine, is that the mother’s narrative probably holds some truth… but selectively. It’s not always the lies that bind us most tightly, but the partial truths. The emotionally charged edits that preserve identity at the expense of clarity. When that becomes the family gospel, questioning it can feel like betrayal, even when it’s the only path to freedom.
I’m holding a lot of empathy for you in this. You clearly see the cycle, and you also see what’s possible beyond it. That kind of clarity can be lonely, but it’s also the first step in not passing that story on.
So may we all learn to pause, reflect, and ask: Is this a story I’m still living? Or one I’m finally ready to rewrite?
Thank you. Thankfully, my husband also has this clarity, and it is why our marriage is so good and restful.
Wonderful! I’m really glad to hear that!
Beautiful!! I will be re-reading this, as I do many of your essays. You have a gift, Tamara! Maybe it is cultivated after a lot of practice, or maybe you just have *it*.
Have you heard of Vipassana, an Indian meditation technique? They have these 10-day (and longer) meditation courses (free of cost) where you're meant to observe a strict code of discipline, including observation of silence throughout. No phones obviously, not even books or a scrap of paper to write on, no working out, not even yoga, and light meals only. I have heard of many people feeling a lot of catharsis through this course because they just had to face their worst inner demons; there was no "relief" or distraction. Just being with yourself. The practice of Vipassana, particularly this course, came to my mind while reading this.
I'm really curious to know a little bit about your choice of topics, how you come to them, which ones you choose to write on, and who are some of the authors/thinkers you enjoy reading?
Thank you, what a generous, thoughtful comment. That’s the highest compliment: rereading my work.
And yes, I know about Vipassana, I have Indian friends and that’s how I heard about it a long time ago. That technique, that discipline, is such a powerful embodiment of exactly what this essay explores. No distractions. No external anchors. Just you, your breath, and everything you’ve tried to bury. Ten days with no relief, only raw presence. It’s more than a retreat, it’s a confrontation. And I can imagine why so many experience it as both catharsis and crucible. It’s the clearest possible proof that healing doesn’t happen in noise, but in silence that doesn’t let you hide.
As for your question — I love that you asked. My inspiration comes in different forms. Everything can move me if I’m paying attention. Sometimes it’s something I see happen in the life of someone I love. Sometimes it’s a passing sentence in a book, a line in a song, an old scar in myself, or something stirred from what I call my last life, the emotional memory of who I once was, and what she still whispers.
Often, I don’t choose the topic so much as it chooses me. It shows up. Sits with me. Insists. I’ve learned not to force themes, but to listen, to let the question reveal itself, and then chase it with the sharpest blade I can find.
As for writers and thinkers…. the list shifts like tides. But I’d mention a lot of poets, I read a lot of poetry, then Tolkien, Joyce, Robert Musil, Rushdie, Proust, Umberto Eco, John Fowles, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, Foucault, Joseph Campbell, Bertrand Russell, James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, bell hooks, Carl Jung, Annie Dillard, Octavia Butler… too many to mention all. People who wrote not just to say something, but to see something — and to make others see it too, even if it hurt. Especially if it hurt.
Thank you again for being here, and for asking such a beautiful question. It’s readers like you who make me want to keep answering.
Thank you for responding to the question in such detail. And I love how you describe your creative process, especially the idea of letting the question reveal itself. Grateful for your words and your presence here. Learning a lot :)
Wow.. very insightful and true.. facing our own truths...inspire of fear of the unknown..rather than playing to feelings, however justified by conditioning, that keep us codependent on a fraudulent version of ourselves..trapped in a low vibrational reality, which attracts more suffering, rather than dissolving / transcending it for good.. The search for the truth will expose all parts of you, like sailing through a storm...rather than going around it.. to find the perspective and reality viewed from the stillness of the eye in the middle..but from a 1000 feet above
Thank you, you captured something essential: that facing the truth is not just uncomfortable, it’s destabilising, especially when we’ve spent years building identities on adaptations that once kept us safe. But as you put it, those adaptations can easily become the cage — a fraudulent version of ourselves that feels familiar but keeps us vibrating at the frequency of suffering.
That metaphor (sailing through the storm rather than around it) is exactly what transformation demands. No detours, no spiritual bypass, just the raw, disorienting work of letting every illusion be stripped by the wind. Because only then do we reach what you describe so powerfully: the stillness at the center, and the perspective from 1,000 feet above.
So, thank you for that clarity!
I’ve suffered narcissistic abuse from my father, which shattered my authentic self. For years, I didn’t know who I truly was. When I finally realized it, I blamed and cursed my father. I wept, felt terrible, became depressed, hopeless, and afraid of everything.
I don’t know whether I’ve healed or not—maybe I’m still in the healing process. But I do know this: I journal my thoughts, and I’ve confided in a close friend about what I felt in that relationship. Gradually, I began reclaiming my old self.
I don’t talk much about it now. I look at my past self with compassion. I haven’t forgiven my father, but I no longer get triggered by the things he planted in my mind.
Now, I take responsibility for my actions and my life. I don’t resent or blame anymore. I just live in the moment. When I compare my present to the past, it feels completely different.
This man—me—is strong. He is free to do what he wants. The one who once couldn’t make friends now has healthy social relationships. Everything is different. I’m reclaiming the person I once was.
Thank you for this, for your honesty, for your strength, and for letting your truth breathe here. What you’ve written is more than a simple comment, it is a testament. You’ve walked through fire and emerged yourself, not untouched, not unscarred, but real.
The way you describe your journey, from confusion to clarity, from rage to responsibility, is deeply moving. You didn’t bypass the pain. You sat with it. Wept with it. Faced it. That, to me, is healing, even if you don’t feel “finished.” Because healing isn’t a polished ending, it is a reclaimed beginning. And you are in it, fully.
What you said about not knowing whether you’ve healed… that’s such an important point. Healing often doesn’t feel like fireworks or clarity. Sometimes, it feels like what you described: a quieter nervous system, a softer heart toward your former self, a life that doesn’t revolve around survival anymore. That is transformation, even if it doesn’t wear a crown.
You may not have forgiven your father, and you don’t have to. Forgiveness isn’t a performance or a spiritual checkbox. Sometimes, not being triggered is the loudest form of liberation. When the voice that once ruled your inner world grows silent, you become the authority. That is a form of resurrection.
And this man you speak of now — the one with friends, with agency, with peace — he is the proof. Not that the past didn’t wound, but that it didn’t win.
So keep reclaiming. Not just who you once were, but everything you never had the chance to be. That’s where your story lives now… not in blame, not in fear, but in freedom.
Thank you for this!
Disturbingly original. Here I am trying to recall a play which eg Shakespeare might have written along a similar theme, but cannot, at the moment, although many hint at it.
It seems to me that courage is what’s needed, to change one’s habitual approach to life.
Could it be that, in this Holy Week, it is Jesus, who chose to follow His father’s will, underwent the most transformative change of any man in history.
Any change we might seek to endure cannot be as severe as His, because physical resurrection is not available to us. That offers some reassurance.
Thank you, “disturbingly original” might be my new favourite compliment. And your comment brings such a rich, historical-spiritual depth to the conversation. You’re right: courage is the hinge. It’s not only pain itself that transforms us, it’s the willingness to move through it consciously, to confront the known self and still choose the unknown path. That’s where change begins.
And your invocation of Jesus during Holy Week feels especially poignant for me. He didn’t just experience transformation, He embodied the cost of it. Betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, physical agony… and still, He walked forward. Not in pursuit of comfort, but of purpose. Not to preserve identity, but to fulfill it through obliteration. There is no greater metaphor for my essay’s idea that true cures require death (of the self, the ego, the narrative) before any resurrection is possible.
You’re also right to point out that we don’t get the literal resurrection. But perhaps what we do get is a symbolic one — one that happens over and over in a lifetime. Each time we let a part of ourselves die (pride, illusion, bitterness) something quieter, purer, more free takes its place. We may not rise from tombs, but we do rise from grief, from endings, from truths that once felt like crucifixions.
So yes, your comment is both grounding and galvanising. It reminds me that spiritual traditions, at their deepest level, aren’t about doctrine, but about process. And in that way, Christ’s journey is not just historical. It’s archetypal. It’s the story of all who choose truth over comfort, surrender over safety, and meaning over survival.
Thank you again for framing it with such grace and reverence!
Thanks for your prudent advice. I doubt I’ll intentionally cease to follow you, as your essays are outstanding, & your generous, prompt & considered responses rare in these days of extreme brevity.
Thank you so much! Really! Thank you!
Thankyou indeed. Your referring to us letting a part of ourselves die (pride, illusion, bitterness), reminds me of Confession in the Roman Catholic Church, which provides a simplified means of overcoming our weaknesses. We could view them as ‘sins’. But they often recur. More like relief than cure.
The major issues I face now are principally the deaths over the last few years of most of my immediate family, & the loss of much money through real estate transactions, having been given the wrong advice. We sold properties here in Australia to move Britain or Poland, to be closer to family, but for many reasons couldn’t move there. Now I wish to do so, not only have more family died, but the political & economic situation has deteriorated. And I cannot afford the property we had here, were it for sale. One reason I’m not a paying subscriber to you, yet.
Thank you again for such an honest, tender reply. You’ve woven together spiritual reflection and real-life grief with a kind of dignity that deeply moves me. I’m so sorry for what you’ve endured, the compounded losses of family, security, and direction. When grief and regret intertwine, it can feel like time is folding in on itself, as though choices made in the past are haunting the present, and the future feels like a door that keeps shifting further out of reach.
Your reference to Confession struck me. Yes — it’s a ritual of release, but as you so insightfully noted, it often becomes more about relief than cure. That’s not a failure of the practice itself, but of our humanity. We return again and again because healing isn’t linear, and forgiveness (especially of ourselves) often arrives in layers, not thunderclaps.
What you’re facing now is circumstantial hardship,,the ache of dislocation, the rupture of plans that once held meaning, and the very adult pain of knowing that even well-intentioned decisions can leave us stranded. There’s no quick balm for that. But if I can offer anything, it’s this: don’t confuse being stuck with being finished. Life has a way, maddening, miraculous, of bending back toward possibility, even when the road seems too splintered to walk.
And please, don’t ever apologise for not being a paying subscriber. Your presence, your thoughtfulness, your honesty… that’s the real currency here. You’ve already given far more than most by simply showing up and sharing so generously.
One small piece of advice, if I may: in moments when everything external feels lost or out of place, try to anchor to something internal that can’t be taken. A daily ritual, a walk, a book, a conversation that reminds you of your own rootedness. That is what I do. Home, after all, isn’t always geography. Sometimes it’s made of words, memories, and the quiet decision to keep going.
I’m deeply honoured you’re here. And I hope you’ll continue to be.
Wonderful article! ❤️🩹
Thank you, Daniel!