I had to sit with The Why…
This is for me.
It’s my guardrails; it’s what holds me accountable.
I realize I show up for others as fuel for myself. Call it survival blueprint? It’s why some of us panic—we never like to be late.. (shiiii my nervous system turns on if it is late to be early🤣) I have an academic schema—which is essentially a mental blueprint we use to organize our lives (Piaget, 1952). I live on that structure. Rigid. Panicky. Hyper-vigilant of time and routine. That kept me balanced and aligned. It was my baseline for functioning. I felt backed and structured by the guardrails of academic due dates and syllabi. A recipe that seemed to keep me grounded. After graduation.
Not only did I lose that structure. I Costco Styled life: graduated grad school, got married, moved across the country. Left my beloved California.
The framework fell apart. Savannah drifted, fumbling in a panic of symptoms that were masked by college—learning that I was willing to give my best to other people’s business but wouldn’t show up for myself in my own.
The public eye puts pressure on you. A kind of pressure that—for me at least— makes you want to sh*t yourself sometimes, but it’s enough to make you get your shit together. Not in a performance way, I wouldn’t really know how to do that, to be honest. Because sometimes I really don’t know how to stfu... lmfao (just ask my brother or my husband🤣). I talk a lot. That’s just me. I talk even more when I recognize patterns of control that others avoid.
I was a “why” kid.
I still am.
This time, it comes with pathology labels designed to make you think something is wrong with you. Whatever is “wrong,” I’m learning that sometimes we just inhabit these archetypes—the universal patterns and roles, like the “Scholar” or “Teacher,” that exist in our collective human experience (Jung, 1959). For me, it was the “Scholar.” Education was my ticket out of the dysfunctional system I was in. Survival...
You know about that pendulum swing, right?
Sometimes we can swing too far in the other direction. Over learning just to stay “safe".” Are we really safe? Or did you just create a new version of a psychological prison? Even I have to step back from the work for a while at times. There is way more than just academics, but we use over-analyzing as a form of protection.
I had an academic schema—a mental blueprint or “script” used to organize and make sense of the world (Piaget, 1952). I lived on that structure. Rigid. Panicky. Hyper-vigilant of time and routine. That kept me balanced and aligned; it was my baseline for functioning. I felt backed and structured by the guardrails of academic due dates and syllabi.
Once that disappeared... Hey, Sav?! Where did she go?
The framework fell apart. I was fumbling in a panic of symptoms that were masked by college. But that “Scholar” archetype is also the portal to the “beyond the beyond” type of conversations with people.
You know …Depth…
Do we remember what that is anymore?
That internal need for depth in this current society can leave us feeling unreached in a way that seems “too much.”
We all are, aren’t we?
According to my analysis from the data I have collected over the course of my life and in my professional settings: Why?
Why is it that when it’s for us—our own business—we sabotage, procrastinate, and freeze? I have failed at so many things; why is this what makes me freeze? The fact is, I made it this far in the ability to capture people’s attention, which is the currency right now. Plus, I come in peace—even though some squirm like a stray dog on the freeway that I am trying to save.
Sometimes it makes me break because I go all in.
I burn out.
I over-function because I still have to unlearn blueprints. I still have to learn to pause. I still have to speak up and not swallow. This last year, my body has been screaming at me in jaw tension. For me, that means throat tightness because of biting my tongue. 🤭Really, Sav? This is biting your tongue? I giggle.
I can only be me. And being human is the best ride because my best client relationships are when we are all just one: beings being seen, being heard, being acknowledged. So many of us need it, but we have gaslighted and “sweet-lemoned” ourselves into believing that we didn’t—because we are “strong,” “independent,” la-la-la noise.
Pavlovian-style conditioning is born out of realizing that the emotional heart of life is what Tony Robbins calls that “pull” factor. You can push, but you need something to pull you. This is my pull. I’m not the girl that is sensitive; I’m the girl that feels everything people aren’t speaking. What the collective feels, what my clients’ grief feels, or the joy they feel. Sometimes it brings me to tears because I am so proud of the people I work with. Life is hard. The clients I have gone through/ are going through shiiiiiiit. They made a choice to work with me, they committed, and the relationships were built. The challenges were faced. Goals were achieved. Just like that not only are people telling me I changed their life.
They changed mine…
The Evolution of the “Disordered” Realm
I always question to myself… Are humans really experiencing “disorders” or do we have habitual ways of living that have influenced our personality? Those personalities come with traits. Over time, these traits become patterned, labeled, and sequenced, and suddenly, we have “personality disorders.” In my lens, it becomes “disordered” when you have drifted too far for too long. Years and years and years. Trauma can do that. Being raised by parents who are drifters can do that.
Seeing it from this angle helps depathologize the stigma of labels and lets us see it as a game of life: cause and effect. Yes, genetics plays a role. Epigenetic’s (environment plays a huge factor… I mean look around. We can all agree sh*t got weird after 2020)
Think of it this way. Genes are the Christmas tree, the environment decides if it lights up or not.
The ego makes you resistant to this because it becomes about your feelings. Feeling insulted rather than guided. Society creates more resistance, too, because the noise distracts us and drifts us even further away from our higher self. Every time I teach this I have this mental image.
Real talk: Some of you… *cough* people pleasers— you try to save them and they pull you into drifting too. Then, we enter the “disordered” realm. But that doesn’t mean you are stuck there. Think pufferfish—you are puffed up and out there, drifting through life.
ADHD? It’s an island, and you can get shipwrecked there for decades if you don’t create systems and change your lifestyle. What that means is learn the skills to build you a boat/raft— Something—because the palm trees DGAF if you have ADHD. It’s not just a special club where we get to call ourselves “neurospicy” and do nothing about that neurospiciness except tell everyone. 🙄 Fatigued… This work helps me stay there. In aligned structure— or at least I am getting there. It helps me learn and continue to expand my love for learning with others. It breaks me out of comfort zones as I expand my business and my comfort with being seen. It’s the ultimate exposure therapy for me. Throughout this journey, it has revealed a lot of what I need in order to regain the structure academia once gave me.
Across all ages, this is not just about ego and external noise. I feel within the last year, I have elevated so much in awakening to see beyond that noise of distraction—the kind driving people to Polarity Town, bypassing what does not validate them and their feelings. I see straight into the heart of people and I can finally accept and not feel embarrassed to say that, that’s my art. I don’t know, I guess it’s cheesy or something. I am all for cheesy—depending on the cheese. 🤣(I cracked myself up with that one, as my husband looks at me while I am writing this on my laptop, wondering what I’m laughing at 12:44 AM.)
Myself…Always myself.
See…
The Terminal Crisis: The Death of the “Why”
I had to sit with the “Why.” I realized that being a “Why” kid wasn’t just a childhood phase; it was my primary defense against the drift. When we lose our “Why,” we lose our access to inquiry, and when we stop inquiring, we lose access to ourselves for good. That is the real crisis we are facing. Being the why kids created friction for many that were conditioned to never ask why. Just listen as they were told. What’s happening now is we see this at scale. Now Mental health professionals are being asked to cosign the drift by providing diabgositc labels and “skills” that many will refuse to use anyways. Many humans go to therapy not to get help but to gather research necessary to maintain their role as victim. Sometimes that leaves them with blaming therapy for not being effective. We as humans find a why for our suffering more than we care to find a “why” for the reason we choose it over living.
We’ve become a society that is complacent in its own curiosity, settling for the safety of a label because the “Why” requires too much of us, too much effort and maturity. When you stop asking why your nervous system is red-lining. When you stop exploring why you are giving 150% to a system that only asks for 50%, you open the door to be spoon-fed what to think and how to live in fear. We’ve been conditioned to think that the “Why” is a disorder—a symptom of “neurospiciness” that needs to be managed rather than a portal to the “beyond the beyond.” But I am realizing that the “Why” is the only thing that keeps the framework from falling apart.
I heard in a video recently. Animals only sit or do nothing if they are dead or dying.
Sit with that.
You will find those who avoid the message beneath that are those who will find other reasons to argue why animals do nothing rather than to look at their own behavior of stagnation making them ill.
We started playing roles before we discovered who we were, and now we are shipwrecked on islands of our own making, clinging to our “disordered” labels like life rafts that aren’t actually floating. My “Scholar” archetype was my ticket out of the dysfunction, but if I stop inquiring, that same scholar becomes a prisoner of over-analysis and intellectualization. We have to stop using our trauma as the endpoint of the conversation and start using it as the doorway. The level of development this will take—for me, for you, for us—is massive. It requires us to stop biting our tongues and start speaking the truth about the patterns of control we’ve been avoiding. It means choosing the uncertainty of freedom over the coherence of that familiar pain. We were kids begging for the truth, and now, as adults, we whine about the weight of it. But the “Why” is the pull.
It’s the only thing that can lead us away from the labels that harm and imprison us and back to the agency and discipline that can save us.
What do you think?
