Naming Harm. Reclaiming Truth.

There was a time when I believed something that, looking back, was quietly devastating: I thought that because I was suffering so much, there had to be something fundamentally, morally wrong with me. Not just a surface-level flaw, but a "failed a test of being a good person" kind of wrong. I felt like my pain was evidence- a mounting pile of data suggesting that I was, at my core, somehow a bad person.

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I remember one period specifically that still feels heavy to recount. My hair had become so matted from months of being unable to care for myself when I entered BIND, months of not being washed or brushed, that my partner at the time had to spend weeks untangling it. All ninety-six hours of work... spread out over those weeks. Yes, I said ninety-six hours... believe it or not. I remember laying there with akathisia as it rampaged my body while I could not even feed myself, the physical pulling on my scalp burning from the inside out and matching the pulling in my chest.

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I kept thinking: "I must have been a bad person." To me, that physical mess was a confirmation; I told myself that bad things only happen to bad people, and that my suffering was an omen; proof of a debt I was paying for a sin I couldn't even name.

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It didn't help that for years I was surrounded by people who reflected my own darkest fears back at me, offering subtle and not-so-subtle cues that I "lacked alignment." Like many raised in a religious background, I had been taught to spiritually bypass my pain- to pray it away, to "rise above" it, or to see it as a lack of faith, and these new voices just echoed that through their actions and words, suggesting my "vibration" meant I was somehow not acceptable. But the truth was-- it was because I didn’t fit their version of what "good" looked like: the quiet, easy, compliant version--and so I internalized my very survival instincts as a moral failure and a reason for my drowning.

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But I had realized too late that bypassing is the exact opposite of wholeness; by trying to leap over the pain to stay "acceptable," I was just making myself small and disappearing into the background of my own life.

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What I didn't realize then was that I’d been suppressing myself long before the world joined in... I subconsciously had built my entire identity around being "good"- which really just meant being agreeable, never being "selfish," and holding back from being "too much." But with time, I learned a truth that changed everything: the soul and the self doesnt crave perfection, but it craves wholeness. And to be truly whole, we have to embody both the dark and the light. We are taught to fear our "dark" sides- our anger, our boundaries, our hunger for power, but those are the very parts that protect us. If one side is missing, our subconscious will actually attract it in our outside environments, our relationships, and our experiences. We meet our rejected selves in other people because that tension is ultimately what forces us back into one piece...

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Carl Jung spoke to this perfectly when he said:

"Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries."

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He argued that the parts of ourselves we reject don’t just vanish; they reorganize in the shadows. He called it projection.

And while now its great to intellectualize this, at the time I wasn't sitting there with a textbook; I was just living the fallout of it. When you build your identity on being "good," your anger, your healthy selfishness, and your raw desire to be chosen go underground. But as Jung famously noted, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

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At the time, I called it fate. I called it an "omen." I thought the universe was punishing me. But then, life did something almost surgically precise.

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In a dark and deeply unsettling way, psych med injury forced me to confront myself, to actually feel what I had long avoided. And by no means am I saying this from a place of what happened to me is OK-- because its not, nor from a place of full healing; I’m still only about 55–65% recovered. But even from here, I can see a larger landscape that wasn’t visible to me before. It stripped away the ability to suppress. Every "bad" emotion I had ever judged came forward with undeniable force. I had to look at my anger, my grief, and my needs without the filter of "being a good person."

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It turns out there isn't a more direct path to wholeness than being forced to face everything you’ve tried to hide. I wasn’t a bad person, not even close; I was just someone who had tried to be "good" by amputating the parts of myself that were necessary for survival. What i have trully learned is that real wholeness doesn't come from being flawless; it comes from integration. It’s the realization that having needs or being "difficult" doesn't make you unworthy- it makes you bloody human...

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Today, I don't question my core the way I used to.

I’ve stopped pretending the "dark" parts don't exist. I’m done with the curated version.

I know what I’m made of now. I know the strength it took to survive those 96 hours and the years that followed.

And I know, without any hesitation, that I will never abandon myself again just to be "acceptable."

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One love,

Malissa