Here’s a not-so-secret: I’m a music junkie. I love music and often have music playing a good portion of the day. Music inspires, moves, motivates, and captures the human experience in beat, rhythm, and words like nothing else can.
Have you ever heard a song that resonated so deeply, you were like, “That. I couldn’t have said it better myself”? This recently happened for me, as Pandora spontaneously played a new song, “Salt on My Skin” by Curtis Dove: an upbeat song about healing at the beach and starting over.
The chorus includes the line, “I guess I had to fall apart to feel this free,” and later, “I guess I had to fall apart to feel this whole.”
Truth is, that’s my story. I had to fall apart, hitting my own personal rock bottom in years past, to finally pull myself out and feel both as free and whole as I do now. It got me thinking, “But not everyone needs to or should fall apart to feel free or whole.” Perhaps a few of us do, but this is why Her Self Reclaimed exists:
Stretching your Self so thin that you fall apart is not a prerequisite for wholeness and freedom within your Self. That’s not the solution to overwhelm, disconnection, feeling on the brink of burnout, and like you can’t take any more.
Trust me, allowing all the conditions to come together to force you down, mentally, physically, or both, is not recommended. There’s another way.
Maybe you’re not at rock bottom. Maybe you’re still functioning, showing up, getting things done, and still taking care of everyone and everything else that needs your attention. Perhaps it has become harder to open your eyes in the morning until after (multiple cups of) coffee. Perhaps your body feels heavier or more sluggish than it used to. Maybe you glimpse your reflection in the mirror and realize you don’t quite see the vibrant woman you remember, or the woman you still know your Self to be: somewhere underneath all the pressure, responsibility, and noise of life.
If that feels familiar, it’s not it to shame you. I say it because that version of you may not actually be the real You. It may be who you have become while carrying too much, putting your Self last too often, and slowly accepting a level of depletion that was never meant to be normal, even if society has normalized it. While hard seasons, real responsibilities, and difficult circumstances certainly exist, losing your Self to them does not have to be the price of getting through them.
One of the biggest realizations I had through my own healing is that healing is ultimately done within ourselves. That does not mean we never need outside help. I certainly did. Some of my circumstances were structural and required orthopedic procedures. Other parts of my healing came through the work I did with my brain and nervous system, through the daily process of changing how I thought, visualized, spoke, felt, and acted. I also spent fourteen years as a bodyworker, so I deeply value skilled support, good practitioners, and creating the conditions that can allow healing to occur. Let me make it clear: no one heals another person. They may facilitate, support, guide, teach, or help create better conditions, but the healing still happens within the person.
That realization was both humbling and empowering. I had to take responsibility for my own healing because no one else could do it for me. I could receive support, and I did, but I still had to participate fully. I still had to practice daily. I still had to choose, every day, how I was going to relate to my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my circumstances, and my life. I healed my Self physically, mentally, emotionally, and I believe spiritually. It wasn’t done perfectly, all at once, or in some neat linear path, because healing is rarely that tidy, but I healed in ways I once did not know, or perhaps fully believe, were possible.
What I did not fully understand until I experienced it is how much power we have between our ears. I knew about mindset and neuroplasticity intellectually, but knowing something and experiencing it in your own body are not the same thing. The truth is that we as human beings have the capacity to change our physiology, our thinking, our behavior, our circumstances, and our lives through what we repeatedly think, visualize, speak, and do. This is not toxic positivity. This is not pretending hard things are not hard. This is not looking at a painful reality and trying to paint it pink. This is neuroscience.
Hard realities exist. Don’t I know it. There are circumstances we do not choose, seasons that ask more of us than we think we have, and challenges that are real in every sense of the word. Acknowledging those realities matters, but there is a difference between acknowledging hard reality and rehearsing it so often that it becomes the only thing the brain knows how to look for. I have seen this in the brain injury community, and I have lived it myself in years past. The problems were real, the symptoms were real, the limitations were real, but when the challenges become all we can talk about, all we can see, and all we believe is possible, we can begin to lose ourselves inside them. It’s like being so caught up in the forest we get entirely turned around and lost.
Some circumstances are just plain shitty. There is no need to spiritualize or sugarcoat that. Even then, you do not have to lose your Self to it all. You may not be able to control every circumstance, every person, every diagnosis, every demand, or every season of life, but you may have more power than you realize over what you repeatedly think, what you choose to focus on, how you speak to yourself, what actions you take, and how much effort you are willing to bring toward the life you say you want.
This is where responsibility becomes empowering, not shaming. Responsibility does not mean, “This is your fault.” It means, “This may be yours to influence.” It means there may be places where you believe you are powerless when, in truth, there is still something available for you to choose. Maybe you can’t change the whole picture or the biggest external thing, not immediately, but something.
For many women, that “something” begins with recognizing where they have been putting themselves last: not once in a while, because life will always ask us to make sacrifices at times, but consistently, repeatedly, even almost automatically. It may show up as saying “yes” when everything in you is already tired. It may show up as having boundaries but not upholding them. It may show up as forgetting why you are doing all of this in the first place. It may show up as looking around one day and wondering, “What am I doing?” or “Where is my life going?” or “Who am I without all of these roles and responsibilities?”
If the first answer is “I don’t know,” that is okay. I have said this before, and I will probably keep saying it because it matters: “I don’t know” is always an acceptable first answer. It is not a failure. It may be the most honest place to begin, but it does not have to be the last answer. Sometimes the question needs time to percolate. Sometimes you need space to hear your Self. Sometimes you need someone to ask you the right question and stay with you long enough for the real answer to surface.
Some of those questions may be deceptively simple:
What do you want your life to look like in five, ten, or twenty years?
What matters most to you?
Do you believe that future is possible for you?
If you do not, what makes it impossible for you, specifically?
Is it truly impossible, or is there a belief, fear, doubt, pattern, or circumstance that has started to feel like a permanent wall?
Time, money, children, work, relationships, and responsibilities are all real considerations. They are not imaginary. They shape what is available on any given day, but they are not always the whole truth. A more useful question might be: what aspects of those circumstances are within your control?
Often, the answer begins with your thoughts, your actions, and your level of effort. Not in a harsh, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of way, but in a grounded recognition that you may have more agency than you think or have been practicing.
You do not always need a dramatic life overhaul to begin changing your life. Sometimes it starts internally, because that is free, available, and within your control at any time. It may begin with noticing a thought you keep repeating, such as, “I don’t have time for myself,” and choosing a truer, more empowered thought instead, like, “I choose to put everyone else’s needs on hold for even thirty seconds so I can breathe.”
That may sound small, but small does not mean insignificant. Every time you choose your Self, even in a tiny way, you are making a deposit toward the life you say you want. Like coins in a piggy bank, those choices add up. A kinder thought. A deeper breath. A boundary upheld. A pause before reacting. A moment of remembering that you matter here, too. Over time, those deposits can become more energy, stronger boundaries, less reactivity, more groundedness, more kindness, and a deeper sense of inner authority.
Choosing your Self does not mean taking something away from everyone else. We are always choosing, because we cannot be in multiple places at once and we only have so much time and energy in any given day. The question is not whether you are choosing. The question is whether your choices include you. What you reclaim for your Self is not selfish. It becomes part of what you can continue giving to the people, work, relationships, and communities that matter to you.
The cost of not choosing your Self also adds up. Sometimes it shows up in obvious ways, like stress, health challenges, medical bills, or medications. Sometimes it shows up in quieter, more painful ways, like relationships that suffer, dreams that keep getting postponed, or the slow grief of realizing you have been living around the edges of the life you actually want. Those costs are harder to measure, but they matter.
This is why I do not believe you have to fall apart to become whole. Some of us may have needed the collapse to finally see what had to change, and I hold no judgment around that. I certainly have compassion for the version of my Self who did not know what she did not know. But if you are still standing, still functioning, still sensing that something in you is asking for your attention, maybe you do not have to wait until life forces the issue.
Maybe today is the day to choose one thing differently. Not everything. Not perfectly. Just one thing. One thought. One breath. One boundary. One moment of choosing your Self before you abandon her again.
Maybe someday, when you hear that lyric, “I guess I had to fall apart to feel this whole,” something in you will soften, without judgment or superiority, but with the quiet pride of a woman who listened sooner. Perhaps she had to fall apart to feel whole, but you didn’t. You chose your Self before you Life chose for you.