Healing vs. Becoming

Modern culture is obsessed with “healing…”

Which comes in the form of cages disguised as sanctuary.

First there’s the Cage of Performance, where you publicly announce your boundaries, shadow work, emotional releases, and relational cord-cuttings… shaped by what performs well online, not by truth.

Second is the Cage of Aesthetics. This is the coziest cage, scented with denial, adorned with blankets, earl gray tea lattes, self-help books, detox supplements, and candles… painted with avoidance.

Third sits the Cage of Optimization, also known as the Self-Help Treadmill. A fragile, white-knuckle existence obsessed over upgrading your routines, habits, and systems… instead of upgrading your actual self.

Finally, we have the Cage of Wound Worship: Where trauma becomes identity and trauma labels are used as excuses for ingrained behaviour… instead of portals into growth.

Man… fuck these cages. 

None of them requires changing your environment, shifting your identity, creating something new, risking heartbreak, saying no, saying yes, expressing desire, allowing joy, following truth, or stepping into your power, which is where growth comes from.

Many cling to healing because it’s their safest, most familiar identity.

Healing is contractive, retrospective, introspective.

Healing means staying self-focused and controlled: safe.

Healing is socially acceptable. Nobody judges the wounded.

But healing doesn’t actually catalyze growth. 

You return to baseline.

Becoming, however…

Becoming creates the conditions for healing by default.

Becoming is expansive, forward looking, exciting.

Becoming is risky, demanding change and visibility.

Only becoming builds a life worth living.

Which is why, even at my lowest and darkest, I never resonated with “healing.” 

I knew I wasn’t well, but everything I read or was suggested just felt like mis-pathologizing a deeply rooted, common, misunderstood problem:

I wasn’t showing up as the person I knew I could be… as the version of me who felt trapped deep inside… clawing for escape, clamouring for embodiment.

Which is how I stumbled onto the becoming approach to personal growth. 

I took the ‘mythic me’ I wanted to become… then wove my myth into reality.

To do so, I tore down and rebuilt my nervous system. I changed how I show up in, meet, and engage with the world. I reimagined how I create, move, speak, breathe, and think. None of this was easy or given, but abso-fucking-lutely worth the effort.

Welcome to self-actualization through expression, not excavation.

You can’t heal a wound you’ve never expressed through embodiment.

You can’t process energy you’ve never given permission to move.

You can’t heal trauma you’ve never allowed yourself to feel.

Healing has become a lifestyle, a personality, a way to delay living.

Is that really what you want?

Becoming is nonlinear, embodied, creative, instinctual, and alive.

Becoming is the hero’s journey woven into real life.

Becoming is identity alchemy… mythic alchemy.

Becoming rewrites your future to your design.

This Whimsie is a doorway, a portal to a different paradigm.

As always, the choice to step through, or not, is yours.

With love from the forest,

~ Alexander