Feel free to listen along.
You see, this song makes me cry every time I hear it.
I’ve always been a big Mac Miller fan. When he passed, it felt like a piece of me went with him. His music got me through some really dark seasons of my life. College. Heartbreak. Confusion. Fear. Becoming. There are certain artists whose words become attached to chapters of your life, and for me, Mac was one of them.
There’s a line in the song that always gets me.
🎶“Digging me a hole big enough to bury my soul. Weight of the world, I gotta carry my own.”
Every time I hear it, I find myself thinking about how much of humanity is doing exactly that. We carry the weight of the world while avoiding the weight of our own lives. We point. We blame. We diagnose. We label. We explain. We search for certainty. We search for villains. We search for reasons. Yet so many of us never stop long enough to sit with ourselves.
The truth is we are all carrying something. All of us.
I’ve lost people in my life. Some physically. Some emotionally. At times, I’ve even lost pieces of myself. I’ve come back swinging every single time, but if I’m being honest, it isn’t the loss that scares me anymore. It’s the fear. It’s the panic. It’s the hypervigilance. It’s the constant anticipation that something bad is about to happen and from the work I do with clients and within myself. We are addicted to that baseline, despite prayers for change. We don’t know how to surrender to a life of peace—because peace is scary.
🎶“You gotta jump in to swim.”
These days it feels like nobody wants to jump. We talk a lot about how we deserve better but never choose better. Ain’t that a trip. We’re all standing at the edge analyzing the water. Looking for guarantees—for certainty. Looking for proof that we won’t get hurt. The problem is life doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t. Trust me I have been trying.
We’re afraid to walk away.
We’re afraid to stay.
We’re afraid to surrender to the imperfect person we chose to marry, build a life with, or have children with.
We’re afraid to trust.
We’re afraid to let go.
We’re afraid to admit that maybe the answers aren’t as simple as the internet wants them to be that’s the sell out point if you ask me. Believing what the internet tells you.
It’s easy when everyone is a narcissist.
It’s easy when every relationship problem has a diagnosis.
It’s easy when every conflict can be reduced down to a label.
What isn’t easy is looking at ourselves. I mean really looking.
What isn’t easy is asking why certain things activate us the way they do.
What ghosts we’re still fighting. Let me tell you, as I sit in front of many clients who can’t see their blind spots from the angle in which I sit. Many of us are in fact fighting ghosts. Does that mean the pain is invalid? Not at all— but see how for some of us our minds take us immediately to “oh so you’re invalidating…” Why is that I wonder? I tend to absorb the grief of my clients. I love what I do, but it gets heavy at times. This work reminds me how similar we all are underneath the surface.
🎶“See, Me and you really ain’t that different.”
Everyone is carrying something.
The mother-in-laws.
The partners.
The celebrities.
The therapists.
The clients.
Mac says: “Weight of the world I gotta carry my own” look around. The moment we wake we have the world in our face. Yet we wonder why the weight within us gets neglected and some how that neglect is the partners responsibility, because well “they’re a narcissist?” Or because it’s the parent’s fault? The governments fault? Some people carry that weight loudly while others carry it silently. Some carry it through addiction, through avoidance. While some carry through achievement or through religion. Some through perfectionism, while others through control. Some through people-pleasing— while others carry through anger.
But everybody is carrying something.
There is no escaping it.
Which makes me wonder why it feels like everyone else is living their best life. I think it’s because we live in a culture that rewards performance over understanding. We are stuck in a pathological prison of pointing and blaming because it is easier than understanding. Understanding requires humility and curiosity. We are more curious about the labels than understanding the person in front of us. Understanding requires us to sit with discomfort long enough to ask a different question. We are not be conditioned for questions. We are being conditioned for accusations.
Curiosity leads us to the practice of asking, “What happened to them?” Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with them?” If we are really brave enough to stay in the heat of that discomfort long enough, eventually we find ourselves asking:
“What happened to me?”
That’s where the work begins.
Lately I’ve been sitting with Proverbs 31 the ideal virtuous wife, and it’s had me thinking about women, history, culture, and the stories that get passed down through generations. Not just biblical stories, but human stories. For those already offended because you think this about religion, pause for a moment. That’s that shit i’m talking about right there. Always offended.. Sit here with me in this discomfort for a moment. Think about generations where women were treated as property. Think about cultures where a woman’s value was tied to marriage, obedience, or producing sons to be “good enough.” Think about the daughters born into those systems.
What was it like to be the firstborn daughter of a system like this?
What was it like to watch your worth be measured against things you couldn’t control?
What was it like to grow up learning that love, approval, or safety had conditions attached to it? And then what happened when those daughters became mothers? How do you think those wounds show up in the way they parented?
How did they affect the daughters?
The sons?
The marriages?
The family systems?
I find myself noticing these patterns everywhere. In my own family. In my husband’s family. In my clients. In myself, and yet so many of us can’t explore them because we’re too busy proving why our diagnosis explains everything. We want a label that lets us stop digging, but digging IS the mission of this work. Digging is what brings us closer to ourselves. We want certainty more than we want understanding, but remember understanding requires us to acknowledge that many of the systems we survived as children are still living inside of us as adults.
Just check your nervous system.
Many of us live in shotgun-level hypervigilance— still waiting for the acknowledgment we never received as a child and may never receive as adults. So what do we do? Dig to get our partners to provide what is ours to work on. Many of us want to be heard so badly that we don’t realize we’re recreating the same dynamics we’re trying to escape. We aren’t bad people— we are hurt people and it shows. We’re out here hurting people trying not to get hurt.
That’s what makes this so complicated.
It’s a blessing and a curse to notice patterns.
These days everyone gets reduced to pathology while I’m sitting here seeing the undercurrents of humanity. I can see what’s underneath the success.
Underneath the “happy.”
Underneath the “normal.”
But when you flip that stone over and get close enough. You realize underneath it all that we consider “highlights” there lives: Addiction, resentment, depression, loneliness, attachment wounds.
The family secrets.
The shame.
The ache.
Creatives of all types didn’t create what they did because they had low ACE scores (Adverse Childhood Experiences.) Most gifted people don’t. Their gifts, just like my own are grown in the same soil as the wounds. That’s uncomfortable to admit because we want healing to erase the wound. We must understand though—sometimes healing isn’t about erasing it. It’s about learning how to transform it. Imposter syndrome is real, even for me. I sit with clients much older than me. Clients who have lived entire lives before I ever entered the room. Yet when I sit with them, I don’t see age.
I see beings.
I see people carrying stories.
I see people trying to make sense of their suffering.
My gift for helping others came from wounds I endured, But that gift does not exempt me from doing my own work. I think many professionals forget that part.
It doesn’t exempt me from my fear.
My panic.
My distorted beliefs.
My stories.
It doesn’t exempt me from cleaning the lens I look through when viewing life. I know that sounds cliché, but many of us don’t want to:
🎶“See what's behind all them unturned stones”
And I think that’s where so many of us get stuck. We want our partners to turn our stones over and to validate us in ways we demand not realizing the war we started within ourselves trying to gather accountability from the people we chose. It creates a behavior that if we zoom in close enough to see. (if we turned that stone over) would realize just how much that war starts to mimic exactly what we survived as children. Becoming those very parents we had to survive. Thats how generational trauma works. You see— it’s a blessing and a curse to be a pattern recognizer because you can’t turn it off. These days we have hyper-focused into patterns of pathology instead of humanity.
Now, for some of us—we can give:
Everyone else understanding.
Everyone else grace.
Everyone else patience.
Yet we don’t offer it to ourselves.
Instead we overexplain.
We defend.
We prove.
We argue.
We try to get them to understand. While doing so we lose sight of how that very fight is what starts the self-abandonment.
We so desperately want to be heard.
Want to be chosen.
Want to be understood.
Yet we walk right past the one person we’ve neglected the longest.
Ourselves.
So— are you ready to jump in and swim?
