Why You Don't Need Fixing
And What That Means for Your Creativity, Your Love Life, and Absolutely Everything in Between
The Self-help industry sort of buzzes, rattles, and hums with a kind of desperation, dressed up in silk scarves, and the hypnotic cadence of someone selling salvation in three easy steps.
As a kid, I grew up in the belly of the beast. Evangelical ministers stalking their podium—cajoling, casting spells of words—wooing the crowd to come to the altar, to pledge their lives to the church. A few sheckles in the offering plate. A commitment to the congregation. A casserole that mom makes for next Sunday’s potluck. Small steps towards the ultimate prize—eternal security.
Today, I see it everywhere.
I’m not just talking about the endless rosters of coaches, shaman, therapists-turned-influencers, mind-hackers, and life-designers who promise to rewire your brain for abundant living while hopping on one leg off of a cliffside in Bali. It’s also in the books stacked high at the airport snag and grab store. You know the ones? They whisper happiness is just out of reach—you’re almost there if you’d just wake up a few hours earlier, journal a little more, and scream your manifestation mantras a bit louder. It’s the retreats where people pay thousands to sit in a navel shaped circle chanting their pain into something worth writing about on Instagram. It’s in the pyrotechnic-like breathwork and the frigid ice baths and the contrived vulnerability, where suffering is worn like a Greek mask. It wants you to believe that healing is a clearly marked path, a steady climb toward some enlightened plateau where you finally stop waking up at 3 a.m. with your heart racing, where you no longer flinch at the ghosts pressing against your ribcage.
You notice it too, right?
And underneath all the glow and promise, there’s that gnawing sense that the whole thing is just another way to keep you reaching, striving, never quite getting to where you’re going.
It’s an industry built on the promise that you are almost whole, almost there.
Don’t be fooled. It’s not new news. This has been around since the dawn of civilization. Priests on ziggurats asking the mob to dance a little harder and pray a little louder for rain. Mesmerists inviting you to concentrate more on the Ouija board in the center of the room so you’ll hear the voice of your dead spouse. Psychoanalysts with their book of woe, diagnosing you as literally sick in the head, and in need of an endless weekly confessional only they can provide, to keep your demons at bay.
The whole thing thrives on the ache of incompleteness, on the quiet terror that maybe—just maybe—you are fundamentally broken.
It offers a thousand ways to smooth out the rough edges, to sand yourself down into something manageable, something easily consumed.
Shadow work becomes an Meta aesthetic, the deep plunge into your psyche distilled into an AI generated workbook with neatly outlined exercises. Trauma is repackaged as creator content, sold back to you in digestible bites, crafted for mass appeal.
It tells you that you can leave your pain behind if you just try hard enough. Meditate more, cut out gluten, wake up at dawn and stare at the sun until your sadness evaporates.
As if grief cares about your circadian rhythm. As if loneliness can be exorcised with a probiotic.
The truth is that real healing doesn’t sell well. It never has.
It can’t be branded, or turned into a three month program. It doesn’t give you a gold star for doing the work.
Real healing isn’t about patching the cracking ice back up. It drags you down into the deep, where the water is murky and the old wounds don’t close just because you assigned that part the name of your disapproving high school teacher.
Healing, real healing, isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about realizing you were never broken to begin with.
Enlightenment is when you realize there’s no enlightenment.
Wholeness is what happens when you stop trying to be less broken.
Happiness is what happens when you embrace reality, as it is.
And if you think about it for a moment, you realize all of this has an air of waiting for the real life to begin. Waiting for the world to get better, courage to arrive, love to bloom, trauma to be healed, justice to reign, the relationship to manifest, the shadow to be integrated, purpose to be discovered, friendship to grow, passion to take hold, your work to be seen, the right moment to come, the Safety to be how you wish, heaven or enlightenment, your dream job, for wholeness, an uncomplicated existence…waiting, for life to begin.
We create fantasy’s in our mind—something that we imagine someone else has that we don’t: the life we believe we deserve, the experience we wish would have happened, our rights and wrongs, and then contrast this with reality. Comparison to an imagined truth leaves us suffering. Every time.
Give up this suffering? Never.
Instead we shame ourselves. We blame ourselves. We judge ourselves as broken. Dark. Shadowy. Shameful. We become Addicted to fixing that which is we deem as broken.
Lonely. Desperate. Starving. Scrolling through the endless (bad) news. Pandering to people who don’t care about us. Neglecting ourselves. Rejecting ourselves. Suppressing. For what? To be better?
How’s this working?
And if the improvement game worked it would have by now. In your life, in world history.
Here’s the truth: It didn’t work for them and it’s not for you. It’s a ponze scheme. You have to keep pouring into it to keep up the appearance that it works. But actually it’s hollow.
Most of us are living as if we did not really want to be happy—only certain. We want to be feel justified and in the right. We want to look good. But happy? No.
Rightness is its own game. Certainty is its own pursuit. Happiness is something different. Don’t confuse the two. One process doesn’t lead to another.
Obsessing over how we appear to others, anxiously avoiding getting it wrong or making mistakes, planning all of our next steps, rigidly categorizing the world into black and white, right and wrong, good and bad; endlessly problem solving or attempting to make things "better," don't lend themselves to satisfaction. They're a whirlpool of motion, but not much real movement.
Don’t trade the dream of a better life for fully living the one life you’ve got.
Because the life you’re avoiding—the one tangled with doubt, loss, longing, and imperfection—is also the life where your creativity lives. The hard edges, the unresolved questions, the stories you’re afraid to tell—this is the real stuff, the marrow.
Your shadow isn’t a detour on the creative path—it is the path.
Your creativity doesn’t come from avoiding the dark. It comes from walking through it.
The places you resist, the emotions you suppress, the stories you’d rather not tell—these aren’t barriers to creativity; they’re the raw material.
True self-expression emerges from the depths we’re often afraid to enter. When we descend into it—without judgment, and with curiosity—we find the very essence we’ve been searching for. The shadow isn’t darkness for the sake of darkness; it’s the fertile soil where the core of your creative essence grows .
Stop trying to create from a place of perfection—from a place of healed wholeness..that’s the trap, the endless ego game. Connect to your fears, your darkness, your passions. Connect to your desire, your grief, your longing. Connect to the parts of you that don’t fit neatly into the story you’ve been telling about who you are. The free parts. The wild parts. The parts you’ve been taught to hide, to quiet, to control--that are longing to be born.
Create from the places that ache. From the questions that don't leave you alone. From the wounds that can't fully healed—not to fix them, but to feel them at last-- to let them speak.
Our wounds aren't our weaknesses—even though we’ve been taught to fix them, cure them, hide them, and cover them up.
And while the healing industry loves to sell us the illusion of wholeness, as if it were a checklist you can complete, or an affirmation you can repeat until you forget you’re human. Real healing doesn’t fit on a vision board. It’s not neat or tidy and it doesn't follow a dummy's guide.
Your wounds are truths, written in the language of your body, your heart, and the history you carry with you into the room.
What if the goal isn’t to “get over it,” but to go through it? Not to transcend your being human , but to descend into it—into the loneliness, the ache, the complexity—and find your still beating purebred heart , unconcealed.
Creating isn't about some ideal. It's about the fractures, the flaws, the fault lines--the places where the light breaks in.
Because your wounds aren’t proof you’re broken. They’re proof at some point you lived.
So forget the quick fixes. Forget the life hacks.
Sit with your pain long enough to let it speak.
Try this: This is the day you have. Fall in love with it. Don’t suffer from the belief that there’s something better tomorrow. This is it. Kiss your love. Send the message. Feel everything—the joy and the sorrow, the meanness, the depression, and the delight.
End what you must. Hang up the phone. Care for them—whoever it may be. Two or two thousand miles away. Throw yourself into it. Every rise and fall.
Don’t trade the dream of a better life for fully living the one life you’ve got.
There are real love stories going untold, callings left unheeded, purpose not pursued, books unpublished, conversations unspoken, lovers unloved—because we are waiting. Stop waiting for the good life to arrive. This is it.
Don't be afraid of being a whole self—including your shadows.
***
This past week, I released a pivotal episode of The Creators Podcast—one that traces a 25-year quest that has taken me across the world in search of a wisdom rooted in the heart. From the moment I first encountered the Enneagram as a young man, I knew it held something deeper. Uncovering the work of its innovator, Óscar Ichazo, led me to Argentina, to the origins of his ideas, and to teachers who didn’t just inform me but transformed me—guiding me toward my most essential self. This episode is part of the story of that journey.
For decades, I’ve used the deep Enneagram—not just as a tool for my own transformation, but as a guide in my work with others. It reveals the ego’s patterns, its struggles to protect itself, and, most importantly, the road back to essence. Now, for the first time, I’m teaching a very special iteration: The Enneagram of Creativity & Shadow.
This isn’t the Enneagram you’ve heard before. Whether you're deeply familiar with it or completely new, this workshop will shift your relationship with yourself and your creativity. The goal isn’t to bypass your shadows—it’s to use them as the portal to your most holy path of creation.
Space is limited. Reserve your spot now for February 16 at 10am PST.
At some point, you have to decide.
To stop waiting for the right moment.
To stop believing the myth that you need to be healed, whole, or somehow better before you can begin.
To stop chasing certainty and instead, step into the wild, uncertain terrain of your real life—the one unfolding right now.
A lot of people will keep selling you the promise that you are almost there. Almost enough. Almost whole.
But the truth?
You were never incomplete.
You don’t need something else to fix you. Or to add more to who you are.
You need the courage to embrace all of who you already are—including the contradictions, the struggles, the rough edges.
Real creativity, real transformation, real aliveness—it doesn’t come from avoiding the dark.
It comes from walking through it.
So go.
Create.
Love.
Speak.
Feel.
Live.
Not because you’re finally ready, but because you always were.
Sending you love,