For the better part of two decades, I was searching for the reason I was broken.
Not casually – forensically. Doctors, specialists, tests. More tests to explain the first tests.
Eventually the doctors ran out of ideas. I kept going.
An accidental education in medicine, psychology, spirituality. Countless hours of meditation. All the psychedelics. A certification in shamanic practice. Every natural modality with a name and several without.
I excavated my childhood from every angle – the religious programming, the fearful introversion and alienation of school, a neurodivergent mind quietly running different software the whole time.
And the thing is, it worked.
The bulbs lit up and all the dots connected. I finally held the complete map of what went wrong. When, where, how. The perfect explanation for why I was broken!
It was blissful. Comforting. Liberating.
Until it wasn’t.
Because nothing actually changed. I felt exactly the same. There were no problems left to solve and I was still broken.
That’s when it started to land. The answers were never going to get any clearer.
What needed to shift was how I was looking at the problem.
What surrender isn’t
Surrender is not a destination.
You don’t arrive one day and everything magically resolves. It’s not the cathartic movie moment – collapsing to your knees in the rain while the soundtrack swells.
It’s a perspective shift.
From needing a reason for everything, to accepting that some things happen far beyond our comprehension.
That doesn’t strip the thing of its significance. It’s just an acknowledgement that there are forces at play greater than us.
Caroline Myss puts it something like this: don’t ask universe-sized questions and expect the answer to fit inside your head.
Surrender is not something you do once then sail on merrily – you have to keep showing up for it.
It lives in the small moments more than the dramatic ones, which is inconvenient.
The small moments are exactly when you forget.
Permission
Mostly, surrender is showing up for yourself. Seeing that what you need in that moment is not an answer – it’s permission.
Permission, for once in your life, to not have to try. Or at least, not try so hard (baby steps for a perfectionist).
Sometimes that looks like nothing at all. Just sitting quietly with the ‘you’ that’s left when everything else falls away.
Occupying the uncomfortable, lonely silences and ignoring the voice that says do something. Fill the void with something, anything. Noise. Action. Busy work. Distraction.
Surrender is meeting the boredom with open arms. Letting the feet stay itchy and the mind go quiet.
Sometimes it’s heavier than boredom. The feeling that you’re not good enough, that your life is one big out-of-control mess.
And instead of fighting it, you lean in. You let the despair fill you, overflow you.
And then something strange happens.
You don’t dissolve. You don’t disappear. You hold it, without judging it as wrong.
And it turns out it’s not the end of you. It’s not actually even you.
It’s a feeling. An energy. It often leaves as quickly as it came, and you’re no less worthy for having felt it.
This can be hard to hold – partly because the people who love you will be desperately trying to save you from it. Comforting you. It’s not your fault. Trying to solve it for you.
Not because you asked, but because your pain is too painful for them to witness without resolution.
They mean well. But rescue isn’t always what the moment needs.
Except when it’s you talking them off the ledge at 1am, after their attempt to save you goes south.
The trade
Surrendering means you stop taking responsibility for every bad thing that happens in your life.
It also means you don’t get to take credit for every good thing. That’s the trade.
You put down the whole scorecard, not just the losses.
The ups and downs, the mess, the confusion – the goal was never to eliminate them. It’s to start moving with them. Learning from them.
Learning through them.
From this place, the world starts to look different. The illusory line between self and everything else gets thinner.
Bad luck and accidents start to look less like punishments and more like lessons you’re still in the middle of learning. Synchronicities show up – or maybe they were always there but you finally have the bandwidth to notice.
Intuition gets louder. Trust builds. Not because life got easier, but because you stopped auditing it.
Still learning
I’d love to be able to say I’ve mastered this.
I haven’t. I still struggle with it often – some days I’m back in the old pattern before breakfast, hunting for the fix, gripping the map.
But when I remember – when I actually put it down – the strangest thing happens.
Nothing resolves. And everything softens.
Turns out I’m not broken. I guess there’s nothing to fix.