Returning To The Cage (To Find A Better Way Out).
A powerful reframe on the cyclical nature of healing
This journal is a fully reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to buy my book, purchase some of my art (and other swag), or become a paid subscriber here and help me to keep my writing alive and flowing for everyone.
This essay is available to both free and paid subscribers. If you enjoy it, please share it with your network.
A few months ago, during my interview for my dearheart Morgan Wade’s podcast, The Loving Kind, we spoke about the fierce and paradoxical intertwining of love and grief, which evolved into a deep dive on the cyclical nature of healing.
During our conversation we took a look at the cultural notion that healing is a one-and-done straight shot that you can medicate, yogify, and therapize your way to.
X marks the spot, happily ever after. Forever and ever, amen.
As if.
(You can probably guess how I feel about that).
During that conversation, Morgan shared a lens on healing that she had received from a friend of hers:
Instead of the recrimination we tend to lay on ourselves when we are repeating a lesson, or the hot flush of shame that washes over us when we find ourselves back in the grip of a pattern we thought long since shed, or the fuckery of realizing that, once again, old trauma has reared her ugly head to trigger us with her vicious claws (let’s collectively call these Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Things) this reframing offers a different narrative.
When we find ourselves back in a loop of healing (or grief or trauma or heartbreak) we are not failing at the task of healing, we are not fucking up, we are not missing some essential ingredient—we are simply returning to the cage to find a better way out.
Listen to a clip of Morgan and I diving into this reframe here, and go check out the entirety of this beautiful conversation here:
Let that sink in for a little bit.
We return to the cage to find a better way out.
Again and again and again, we return.
Again and again, we find our way out.
Pick the locks.
Bend the bars.
Dig a tunnel under the walls.
Grow wings and fly up, up, up into the treetops overhead.
We find a better way out.
In the months since Morgan originally gifted me this reframe, I have shared it with more people than I can count.
With friends during long discussions about our stubborn hearts and their determination to return to the scene of our downfall.
With clients when talking about the blocks that stand between us and the full-on embrace of our birthright of autonomous sovereignty.
With my lover when we get hopelessly embroiled in the ‘oh fuck, how the hell did we land here again?’ undone spaces of relationship spiral.
Again and again, we return to the cage.
Again and again, we give all we have to find a better way out.
Notice, I didn’t say an easier way out.
Or a faster way.
Or even a more gentle way.
Just a better way (which might mean any of those things or none of them at all).
Perhaps your version of better is cleaner. With less carnage and collateral damage.
Maybe this time we figure out how to do it more honestly, more boundaried, infused with the sort of hard-earned integrity that only comes from years of living.
You may have finally incorporated the lessons necessary to make better feel softer and kinder and safer to the holy animal of your body, more like a hand guiding you insistently through the dark than a pummeling with hard fists in the depths of your shadows.
It could be that there is more acceptance, less fruitless fighting, and a new resolve to be with what is instead of battling for what was or what might be.
Maybe you waste less time on the preliminary steps, you’ve discovered most of the hiding spots, or the remaining questions seem less like impossible riddles and more like the whispers of soul-wisdom you’ve been hearing in your sleep for years.
Maybe now the cage feels kind of like an entirely solvable escape room you’ve practiced again and again instead of a trap door/dead-end room with no discernable exit.
When you return to something you thought you’d put to rest, when you cycle back to a lesson you imagined you’d already completed, when you stagger headfirst into a trigger you’d believed subdued and feel the bite of its sharp teeth—this reframing of healing as a cage we return to asks you to pay more attention to what is different than what is the same.
Okay, so there you are, back in the cage.
But are you calmer now, even just ever so slightly?
Are your head and heart able to access a sliver more clarity?
Did you exit the surreal dreamland of anxiety and reenter the regular world with less loss of self?
Do you speak your truth and hold your boundaries with even marginally more ease than the last time you tried?
When you stumbled and tripped and flailed our way off the path, did you find your way back with more grace and fewer wrong turns?
There are a million measures for what ‘better’ might include.
But here’s the thing - you’ve got to be tenacious in noticing and naming your own personal betters, no matter how small or insignificant they might appear.
Landing back inside the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Hard Thing once again is not a marker of how much or how little healing you’ve done (it’s simply an unavoidable reminder that you’re human).
What *is* a marker of your healing?
The tiny-almost unnoticeable- sometimes hard-to-catch alterations in the ways you experience the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Hard Thing this time around.
In your heart.
In your body.
In your brain.
In your relationships.
In your soul.
And I promise, the differences are there.
Pick them up and tuck them in your pockets.
Plant them in the garden and watch them grow.
Get a magnifying glass or a microscope and examine them up close and in detail.
Become a scientist intent on the observation of one singular hypothesis: That you are, indeed, deep inside the process of healing.
That is it working.
That you are doing it.
That the grip of your trauma is not the same as it was last year or last month or last week.
That the demons that visit you in the dark of night are shrinking, bit by bit.
That the grief may not be lessening but you are finding the strength to balance its weight.
That your voice is stronger. That your wisdom roots deeper. That you are no longer able to be talked out of yourself.
Stop seeing the cage as evidence of failure.
Learn to see it for the beautiful teacher it is.
Find your better way.
Make it bigger and bolder and louder than anything else in your entire world.
You’ve done it and you’re doing it and you’ll do it again.
Brave as fuck.
Whole and good.
Finding your way to freedom with every breath, every step. every single word.
xo.
PS: When it comes to my own personal cages (and yes, I have many of them sprinkled all around my inner territory) almost all of my best escape routes have been found by following the breadcrumbs of words.
By asking the right questions and sitting long enough to answer them— ink on paper showing me my own better way.
If you’re like me, and you know that words have led you out of the cage before, and will again - this is your invitation to join me in a year-long writing practice.
Once I started writing this email I decided to make Every. Damn. Day - my 365-day collection of soul-deep writing prompts - available for half off for the very first time.
For just $47 ($50 off the regular price) you will receive daily emails for an entire year which include
Words of wisdom intentionally plucked from my writings on themes of sovereignty, creativity, beauty, and truth.
Question-based prompts designed to help you write your way out of whatever cages are holding you separate from your essential self, your truth, your wisdom.
One email.
+One inspirational passge
+One powerful writing prompt
+One entire year
——————————
= 365 possible keys to the cage
Just use PROMO CODE: EDD50 to receive the entire year-long program - and start writing your escape route.
Better, braver, bolder, and all your own.