For a long time, I tried to fix things from the inside.
I did a lot of self-reflection. I thought about what worked for me and what didn’t. I kept telling myself to stay positive, to not push too hard, to do what I could, to give my best, to put myself first.
I tried to manage my internal state.
I know meditation works for some people, but it never really worked for me. My mind doesn’t quiet easily. It runs. It connects dots. It loops. It processes. The hamster is always running on the wheel.
So instead of trying to stop it, I let it run.
I tried to understand things logically. I tried to make sense of patterns. I tried to connect what I was feeling with what was happening.
I tried gratitude too. I liked the idea of it, but I wasn’t consistent. I’d forget. I’d drop it. It never became something that actually changed how my life functioned.
Staying positive did help me endure difficult moments.
When situations were negative — when there was conflict, pressure, or even bullying — staying positive was how I survived it. I kept telling myself it would end. If there’s a start, there’s an end. I just need to get through this.
And that mindset worked… for surviving.
But it didn’t actually change anything.
The loop
Over time, it started to feel like a loop.
The same types of situations kept coming back. The same dynamics. The same feelings. The same outcomes.
It felt like that movie where you keep waking up in the same day over and over again.
Different details. Same structure.
That’s when I noticed something uncomfortable:
I kept choosing the same things.
Not consciously — but by default.
I was responding in the same ways, staying in the same patterns, making the same kinds of decisions… and then wondering why I was ending up in the same places.
All my internal work was helping me tolerate the cycle.
It wasn’t breaking it.
The shift
The actual shift didn’t happen when I tried harder.
It happened when I chose differently.
Not better. Not more optimized.
Just… different.
That’s when the loop finally broke.
It felt strange at first — almost disorienting — like waking up from a dream you didn’t realize you were in.
Not because everything suddenly became easy.
But because something fundamental changed.
I wasn’t just adjusting myself to fit the same structure anymore.
I was stepping out of it.
What that changed
The biggest change wasn’t external at first.
It was internal relief.
Relief from the feeling that I was constantly failing to fix myself.
Relief from the idea that if I could just think better, feel better, be better, heal more, optimize more… things would finally work.
Letting go of that was surprisingly light.
Not because I gave up.
But because I stopped fighting something that was never meant to be solved that way.
A different way to see it
Looking back, I don’t think I was broken.
I think I was inside something that didn’t fit.
And no amount of internal optimization can make a misfit feel aligned.
You can cope with a structure.
You can survive a structure.
You can even grow inside a structure.
But sometimes what needs to change isn’t how you are…
…it’s where you are.
A quiet question
So maybe the question isn’t:
“How do I fix myself so I can handle this better?”
Maybe it’s:
“What if nothing is wrong with me… and it’s just the structure I’m inside that no longer fits?”
And what would change if you allowed that possibility?
