Individuation, Reflection, and Vulnerability

There's more to you than the story line you were handed...

There’s a moment in adulthood where the floor falls out…maybe it’s after a divorce, maybe a loss of a career in which you'd spent 30 years serving. Maybe when your kid turns 13…maybe a diagnosis of cancer, or possibly the learning of terminal disease in a loved one. Maybe that loved one already passed? A part of your perceived identity is abruptly ripped away, and you are left feeling alone, lost, direction-less. You look around and are forced to reckon with a loss of your reality. Who am I now that this person is no longer here? What is my life to become after this career ends and I no longer have "a calling?” You realize you’ve been following a script you hadn't helped write. A whole narrative shaped by family expectations, generational trauma, scientific teaching, the education system, spiritual gurus, cultural norms, old pain, and unconscious loyalty to people who meant well but were winging it just like you are.

For a long time, I clung to frameworks that gave me a sense of certainty and control. Science. Data. Even aspects of spirituality. Not because they were wrong or bad, but because my ego needed them to feel control…purpose…direction. They were like mental seatbelts. They gave me the illusion that I was “doing life right.” I could say, “Look, here’s the data,” or “This yoga guru says that…,” or “You need to add more of this (insert anything) to be healthier,” or “This is how it’s supposed to go. It just is.” But the truth is, I was just scared. I'm still scared. Scared to sit in the uncertainty. Scared to admit I don’t have it all figured out. Scared of death. Scared of not knowing the purpose of this game we call life. This awareness, though, once it pops out of its container, can't be stuffed back in. No matter how uncomfortable it is, or how wonderful a return to blissful ignorance would be. True clarity… with all the science, financial certainty, and brilliance we (myself included) project out to the world…yeah, your realize none of us truly has any actual clue what we're doing or talking about. Truly. We are performing. That data…that intellectual brilliance…those financial charts or investment portfolios…those achievements…those spiritual teachings…someone gave them to us, and we are projecting them back into the world. We accomplished them, sure. And that also needs to be validated and honored. But someone told us that they were worthy of accomplishing. Of discovering. And simply accepting that version of truth without reflecting or embodying the why… Why do I care? Do I actually care? When did I decide I care? Did someone make me feel like I should care? Who was this person to me at that point in my life? Will not caring exile me from my tribe? If I don't agree with this particular part of science, or this political stance, will that put a target on my back and create the illusion that I “must not be evidence-based?” Was caring part of an ideal I've attached to? Maybe the picturesque image of what the Western world, capitalism, and our parents describe as “making it?”

It’s like following a recipe. A specific, exact, handed-down formula that says, “This is how it’s supposed to taste.” But individuation? That’s cooking without the recipe card. That’s stepping into the kitchen without your measuring spoons or timers, trusting your senses and your own taste buds. It’s the grandma way. The “just a pinch of this” method. The soulful, messy, intuitive style that scares the hell out of people who need to know it’s 1.5 teaspoons of salt, not 1.3, not 1.7. We’ve been trained to believe that deviation means failure. That if we don’t follow the steps perfectly, the whole thing will collapse. But someone wrote those steps. Someone once said, “This is what this cake should be.” And most of us just obeyed, never asking who got to decide what the right flavor of life was supposed to be in the first place. We forgot we could trust our own palate.

Maybe it shows up as that big, fancy house with a yard and picket fence? It's gotta have at least 3 bathrooms…how could I possibly live without a toilet for every ass in the house?! Assets…property ownership…that perfect car that's “spacious, has all the right safety features, and makes me appear just the right level of important”…a 401k…retirement accounts…financial spreadsheets…Fitbit step counts…sleep scores…Instagram followers…that perfect school district for my child…the activities! Oh, all the activities! My child must be involved in everything. Because if not, I've failed him. Others will recognize that, because I'm not smothering him with my own insecurities, I cannot truly love him…

Or, perhaps it's scientific dogma…maybe religion…maybe climbing the hierarchical ladder in our careers.

What do I care about? Who is the real, deep, authentic me? I've been following pre-written script. And maybe you have been, too? Maybe it's not truly who we are or what our intuitive being believes. Why be defined? Why be labeled? Why live someone else's expectations? Why be told where our journey starts and ends?

Letting go of those attachments? That’s been painful. It has been brutal! But it has been so, unbelievably real… When your ego starts to fall apart…when you stop blindly accepting everything, even the stuff that once made you feel safe…it can feel like failure. It can feel like a loss of structure and safety. And, at times, it can feel quite dark…like “Is life really worth it?” or “It wouldn't be the worst thing to just not wake up tomorrow,” or “Exactly how many of these tablets would it take to make it count?” As a parent. As a partner. As a human. I’ve had moments where I thought, “Wow, I’m really shitty at this whole parenting thing.” That’s where compassion comes in, because without it, we just collapse under the shame. When you fall apart and slowly rebuild from authenticity, you start to see and love yourself. When you truly see and love yourself, you start to see and love everyone around you. The good. The bad. Not your idea of them. Not even their idea of themselves. You see their love, their pain, the untapped potential in them that is just begging to be unleashed.

Individuation, I’ve come to believe, is the way out and the way “home.” It's the path to a world full of compassion and surrender, not fear, control, and dopamine highs. It’s not about becoming someone new. It's not about getting caught in Bible verses and scripture that defined a specific era of human existence. It’s about returning to who you were before the world told you who to be. And it’s messy. It's painful. It often feels like complete rock-bottom…Your brain will tell you “Stop, go back! This is all too much…” But your heart…your heart knows that pain is there for a reason. A lesson, perhaps. At one point, I had to sit with feelings of displaced grief and anger toward my parents. I wanted to scream, “You f**ked me up. Why didn’t you do better? How could you have not known the harm you were causing?” And maybe, at first, I needed to in order to truly feel the emotions I had buried for so long. But this grief and pain…it was not the result of them or what I perceived to be a wrongdoing on their part. It wasn't theirs. It was a reflection of something in me. And healing didn’t begin until I could start to say, to accept: “You were just a person. You were learning, too. Your patterns, your annoying-as-hell quirks, your demonstration of how to love…that's your own process unfolding. My painful journey is not a reflection of your love, and my journey of suffering is not your fault.” If we stay in blame, we get stuck. We are handing the power of our lives over to someone other than ourselves. Religion, spirituality, science, capitalism, wealth, the entire f**king MAGA party…If we bring in compassion, we start to move. We recognize the humanity in everyone, even those who may have caused hurt. Or perhaps those that continue to inflict pain, despite years of proposed “wake up calls.” They “must be stupid, or ignorant.” And in ways, they are. But try and reimagine that ignorance from a lens of hurt, rather than malice. A shield, maybe? See them with the same humanity you hope others will see in you during your darkest times.

Parenthood is a beautiful, complicated detour. We love our children so much that we sometimes pause our own becoming. And that’s okay—for a period of time. But once they begin to individuate, themselves, we need to return to our own work. If we stay tethered to the identity of “mom” or “dad” forever, we risk stagnation, and we risk stunting our children’s path to their true selves. Our love will want to smother them. To protect them from the evil world we live in. But that love…it can also manifest as an unconscious weapon…Our ego attempting to control our children’s narrative. Their unique path. Not out of harm or bad intent. But out of lack of awareness of our own fears.

Our bodies will try to tell us something’s off. It might show up as exhaustion, depression, illness, hormone imbalance, that pain in your neck or jaw that just won't go away, despite Western medicine’s many hopeful “cures.” That’s not just aging. That’s your soul (or whatever word you choose to identify with) tapping your shoulder, whispering, “Hey, wake the hell up, dude (or dudette). There’s still more for you. This…this is definitely not it. No, this is not the end of the story. This is where the real story starts.”

I’m still in the thick of this process. I don't truly believe the process has an end date, really… I’ve noticed patterns in myself, like how sometimes I get overly enthusiastic about sharing the lessons I’ve learned—to the point where I start to question where it's coming from. Is this my ego attaching to this lesson, or is it me? I think it comes from a place of wanting to spare the people I love the pain it took me to figure things out. But individuation is personal. It requires stepping away from the book. The Bible, horoscope projections, spiritual teachings, science. They help us make sense of the journey in the ways we identify with, but they're not what get us there. The pain is part of the lesson. My path is mine. Yours is yours. I can’t write your story, nor should I try. All I can offer is my own, with compassion, in case it helps you feel less alone in writing yours.