What Self-Improvement Narratives Miss About Healing
Sometimes the deepest healing is about abdication — not accountability
On the night that I visited a medium for the first time, I received a wild potpourri of messages from a playful spirit whom she identified as my guide. Some of his messages made me grin, some made me chuckle, and some made the hair on my arms stand up. Believe what you will about whether spirits are real. Don’t worry, I’m not here to proselytize. I just needed to set the stage for one very specific message that, uncannily enough, bore out in my reality as soon as I left that appointment.
During my session, there was a moment when my generally-goofy guide turned a bit serious as he pointed toward my last relationship with a man I’ll call Gonzalo. The guide explained that in order to prepare my heart for my next love, I still had more post-Gonzalo healing to do.
This was a wet-blanket topic.
Gonzalo and I were already broken up for more than three years by then — a breakup I’d welcomed as a relief, because his behavior was abusive. (Even though I didn’t fully realize this until afterwards in the Ph.D. program where I crunched numbers and wrote a whole thesis on intimate partner violence.)
