How I Accidentally Healed Myself into a Full-On Identity Crisis
Would not recommend. Would absolutely do again.
Healing began the way rot begins. Slow. Beneath the surface. Nothing poetic. No gongs or breathwork epiphanies. Just one Tuesday afternoon where I could no longer pretend that responding to texts with "lol same" counted as intimacy. One afternoon where celery tasted louder than usual and everyone’s tone felt like a threat.
I didn’t mean to heal. That’s important. Nobody wakes up and says I think I’ll dismantle every inherited belief today. I was aiming for something gentler. Like feeling less homicidal in traffic. Like being able to sit in a room without performing eighteen simultaneous versions of myself depending on who walked in and whether they were likely to use the word moisturize as either a verb or a metaphor for emotional availability.
But healing is a little like unclogging a drain. You start with some mild curiosity and end up elbow-deep in hair that isn’t yours, wondering if identity is mostly just gunk.
Turns out I wasn’t healing. I was unraveling. Or maybe molting. Shedding the scaffolding I had been mistaking for Self. Which sounds poetic but mostly felt like forgetting how to talk about the weather and developing an allergy to networking events. The whole thing looked a lot like depression, only with better playlists.
“Healing,” if we’re still calling it that, began sometime near the tail end of 2023, though a more accurate term might be psychic combustion. Or spiritual demolition. Or dark night of the soul except with less candlelight and more gastrointestinal distress. The whole thing felt less like growth and more like being eaten alive from the inside by a swarm of existential termites.
Everything I used to love started tasting like cardboard. Music flatlined. Books felt like homework. People I used to orbit suddenly made my skin itch like polyester. It wasn’t disdain exactly. It was a kind of cellular revulsion. The idea of pretending to care about the same empty dramas, the same self-congratulatory monologues disguised as conversations, became neurologically impossible. My nervous system would rather chew glass than answer the phone and perform empathy I no longer possessed.
It wasn’t a phase. It was an exorcism. A full-body rejection of anything that required me to contort, censor, flatter, or nod.
At some point, I stopped knowing what I liked. Favorite color? Used to be mustard. Now maybe cloudless grey. Favorite movie? Used to be that indie one with all the sexual tension and no resolution. Now it’s silence. Actual silence. Not as metaphor. As soundtrack.
I no longer knew how to flirt. My sarcasm started arriving ten minutes late. I could not perform small talk. I tried once and ended up talking about death and digestive health within five sentences. A barista asked me how my day was going, and I said “Honestly, raw.”
I didn’t mean to say that. But it was true. Raw. The new shape of everything.
I started recognizing that everything I used to call love had an asterisk. Every “I’m fine” was trauma cosplay. Every boundary I failed to set showed up later as resentment dressed in passive-aggressive pajamas.
I didn’t replace the rubble with better furniture. I didn’t sage the space or order a crystal-infused planner or make a vision board about my “next chapter.” I sat in it. The mess. The mortification. The kind of psychic hangover that comes from realizing you spent the better part of your adult life performing a version of yourself you wouldn’t even follow on social media.
And then came the withdrawal. Like quitting a drug, you didn't realize you'd been mainlining approval, busyness, small talk, curated likability, strategic compassion, the endless supply of conversational ping-pong where nobody ever says anything real, but everyone feels very seen. I felt like a raw nerve in a world made of sandpaper. I didn't want to leave my house. I didn’t want to be in my house. The walls knew too much.
People kept asking if I was okay. But “okay” isn’t a metric you can apply when your entire internal motherboard is short-circuiting. What I was experiencing wasn't depression. It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t anxiety in the traditional, DSM-approved sense. It was more like an existential molt. Like the soul equivalent of outgrowing your skin and then having to walk around in it anyway, like some spiritually sentient snake suit.
I couldn’t articulate what was wrong because everything and nothing was. I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t particularly want to participate. I didn’t want to return to the person I had been, but I had no blueprint for whoever was emerging.
That’s the thing about healing that most people skip: it’s not additive. It doesn’t give you a checklist of affirmations and yoga poses and gut-healing protocols. It takes. It strips. It demands exit after exit after exit from the illusions that once propped you upright.
The scariest part wasn’t the loneliness. It was the clarity. The sudden realization that I had always known the truth and simply built rituals around avoiding it.
So, I stopped calling it healing. I stopped calling it anything. I just kept listening to the part of me that had finally stopped lying. She wasn’t graceful. She wasn’t kind. But she was honest in a way that no one else had ever been. Not even me.
And somewhere in the wreckage, in the cavernous quiet left by all the things I no longer craved, a sliver of peace arrived. Not the clean, photogenic kind. More like a beat-up lawn chair in the middle of a demolition site. But it was mine. And it didn’t require performance. It just asked me to stay.
So, I did.
Not for closure. Not for transcendence. But because leaving would’ve meant abandoning the only person who had ever truly stayed.
And I was done doing that.
Healing, I learned, is not becoming better. It’s becoming weirder. It’s becoming wildly incompatible with anything that isn’t real. It’s losing your tolerance for polite delusion. It’s watching your entire social life collapse like a Jenga tower made of should and shame and shared co-dependencies.
There’s no diploma. No healed stamp. There’s just you. And a morning where you notice you’re not bracing for impact before checking your phone.
I woke up one day and didn’t hate myself. Not in the motivational-poster kind of way. In the quiet kind of way where the absence of self-loathing felt suspicious. Like, wait, do I not want to disappear right now? Weird.
My goals changed. I no longer wanted to be spectacular. I wanted to be accurate. I wanted to eat when I was hungry and speak when I had something to say and cry in public without apologizing.
People who once felt magnetic now felt loud. Loud with performance. Loud with curated charm. Loud with the echo of their own avoidance. I stopped chasing. Not out of spite. Out of peace. Which, let me tell you, is the most erotic power move of all.
Friends ghosted. Clients vanished. Men evaporated. But I didn’t miss them. I missed the part of me who thought I needed them. I missed the delusion. I missed the scaffolding of self-worth built on their tepid approval. I missed being the version of me they loved, the filtered, font-curated, trauma-triaged one. And she, bless her earnest exhaustion, deserved a fucking sabbatical.
Healing has no climax. It has chores. Dishes still pile up. Rent still exists. You still need to text the IRS back. But you do all of that while becoming unrecognizable to the people who once praised your palatability. And that—let’s be clear—is the win.
Somewhere in the static, I noticed color returning. Not rainbow-bright. Not rom-com triumphant. More like the shade of moss that reclaims abandoned houses. More like the warmth in your palms when you stop wringing your hands.
I started laughing again. At inopportune times. In inappropriate places. Full-bodied, ugly laughing. And I wept. Not from despair. From relief. Relief that I no longer owed the world a version of me it could market. Relief that I no longer felt like a curated gallery of coping strategies. Relief that joy returned not as an achievement but as a side effect of telling the truth.
And yes. I had to burn most of my personality for firewood.
Yes. I had to bury the woman who only knew how to perform likability for love.
Yes. I now cry at commercials and talk to trees and cancel plans without guilt.
And yes, I met humans who stayed. Who saw me. Who asked real questions and listened to the answers. Who did not vanish when I used big words or when my voice cracked from rage or when I said no without frosting it in explanation. They did not require a thesis statement to believe I mattered. They didn’t interrupt. They didn’t shrink. They didn’t “circle back.”
That’s when I knew the healing worked.
Because I didn’t run.
Because I stopped translating myself into dialects I no longer spoke.
Because I now walk into rooms as a whole person and leave as the same.
So yes, I healed myself into a full-blown, soul-stretching, ego-evicting, name-changing identity crisis.
Would not recommend.
Would absolutely do again.