F*ck it Up

In case it wasn’t obvious: you don’t figure out your life by getting it right. You figure it out by fucking it up. Yes, do the work. Absolutely. Go to therapy, read the books, reflect, process, take accountability. But don’t confuse doing the work with fast-tracking your way to a life lived “right”—whatever that even means. Healing isn’t a hack. Growth isn’t a guarantee. And most often, the work is the wreckage. That’s the process. Welcome to it.

Somewhere along the line, we all absorbed this quietly destructive belief: that we’re supposed to just know. Know how to do relationships. Know what job will fulfill us. Know what boundaries to set. Know how to handle money. Know how to show up as a “healed” person after we read a few books and go to therapy for a year. But that’s not how any of this works.

Life isn’t a standardized test. There’s no answer key in the back of the book. There’s just you, fumbling forward, hopefully a little more awake than the day before. That’s it.

But still—we carry shame. Deep shame. Shame for not knowing better. Shame for knowing better and still not doing better. Shame for getting it wrong, for doubling back, for learning the same lesson over and over again. Shame for being human, basically.

But even when you know better, you can still get it wrong. Because you’re not a robot. You’re not a self-help machine. You’re not a podcast episode in human form. You’re a messy, complex, emotional person. You are layered, trauma-driven, conditioned, contradictory, and deeply alive. Which means: you will contradict yourself. You will regress. You will forget everything you learned in therapy during a single heated moment. You will know better and still not choose better. And that is normal.