The Weakness of Willpower

Or, "How 'Mind Over Matter' Made Me Weak and Lonely as Hell: A Mini-Memoir"

A little note before we begin:

We’re in the Great Reorienting. The West is collapsing. The building is burning, and I want to help as many people as I can escape—not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. If you’re still debating whether it’s just one room on fire or the whole damn thing, then this Substack might not be for you.

This piece turned out much longer than I anticipated—it’s a mini-memoir. My story is not so important, but it shows where I’ve been and why I’m here. Now that I’ve laid it out, we can focus on what matters: breaking free from the systems that harm us while we heal our weary selves and create something radically different together. Thank you for being here. 💞☺️

Audio Version:

Falling Down and Finding Recovery

Growing up, keeping my shit together wasn’t optional. No one else was minding the store, so I had to, with an intense hypervigilance. Holding everything in, binding myself with tense muscles and throttled breath—these survival states, an inevitable result of chronic developmental trauma, became second nature. For years, I thought this control was my only strength and power and I didn’t dare mess with it.

At 17, I was kicked out of my alcoholic mom’s house, a wreck with severe cPTSD and no tools or support for the grown-up world. I was abandoned, yet lucky—left with nothing but emergency money an aunt had set aside for me. It kept me afloat long enough to finish high school, get some professional help, and survive until I could figure things out.

I threw myself into recovery and therapy, thoroughly convinced that sheer willpower and self-reliance would save me—because they had. But recovery taught me something crucial: how to ask for help from people who could actually give it, through fellowship with others who had lived the same kind of pain. For the first time, I was experiencing a sense of family—a support system where I wasn’t alone in my struggle.

The World as Teacher

Three years later, I took what little was left of that money and spent a year backpacking around the world. At the time, I hadn’t fully grasped the extent of the inequalities within the U.S. or the ways in which its ideals didn’t match the reality of its people. But living and working as a foreigner shattered the myths I’d been taught—that the U.S. was the greatest country in the world and the ultimate measure of success.

I’d always been deeply justice-minded, but this journey provided tangible evidence and grounding for what really mattered to me. I witnessed shocking disparities between the haves and have-nots, yet some of the most generous, resilient, and joyful people I met were those who had the least. These encounters sharpened my values and gave shape to the person I wanted to become.

When I returned home, the parallels between the world’s inequities and my own inner disconnections became undeniable—there were vast divides between what I’d been taught to value and what I truly needed to thrive. I saw these divides as a reflection of my own brokenness. At the time, this clarity sparked hope—I believed I could fix it if I followed the rules, took the right steps, and adhered to the well-worn path of Western health and wellness paradigms.

Keeping Myself In Line

By then, I had been gaining lots of tools to make sense of my past and was starting to put them into practice more intentionally. Healing was about doing the hard shadow work—facing my monsters, practicing disciplined self-care, crushing my ego, receiving support from others, and ripping off the band-aids. I was ending my isolation, daring to trust others and a power greater than myself. And the people around me were cheering me on.

Perfection was my compass. I stayed “humble” and vowed to just be “a worker among workers.” If I made a mess, I cleaned it up immediately and expected others to do the same. I stayed out of people’s way. If I was aware of being unkind or making a mistake, I’d make amends on the spot, vowing never to repeat it. Then I’d file it away, as a reminder of all the work still ahead, keeping myself in line with a running list of evidence that I had so much further to go.

Secretly, I believed that if I worked hard enough—if I did everything right—a perfect recovery (and a Higher Power) would “fix” everything I hated about myself. My so-called character defects would vanish, I’d be healed, I’d be normal, and all the parts of me that felt out of place or too much would finally disappear.

Starved for Connection

Meanwhile, I found myself in one relationship after another with unsafe, narcissistic people. Starved for connection, I felt marked for suffering, unable to trust what was good for me. I told myself, "my chooser was broken." My hypersensitivity and hyperawareness had trained me to notice red flags, but since I barely felt them in my body, they were easy to rationalize.

I convinced myself that these red flags weren’t that serious, or that I was overreacting. They often appeared to be in different colors. When danger loomed—whether physical or emotional—I repeated my mantra: “I can handle it.” I contorted myself to meet the other person’s needs, disregarding my own safety and well-being.

The West calls these survival skills, and while they are, the term implies a choice—something you can pick up or put down. But these are survival states, ingrained nervous system patterns I had no choice but to adopt, especially when I found myself in situations with the same dynamics that had shaped them.

Appeasement, once a life-saving skill, had become my undoing. Without an intimate connection to myself, I couldn’t see that these situations weren’t mine to fix. I ignored my body’s signals—its warnings, its aversions, its grief—believing I could manage the uncontrollable. Mind over matter, after all.

Recovery as a Double-Edged Sword

And yet, I was still in recovery struggling with an insidious paradox. Instead of these failures being a signal to stop, they became evidence that I wasn’t working hard enough. Every challenge I was presented with meant another “opportunity” to learn how to conquer it. I used the recovery tools against myself: detach, don’t take it personally, let others’ issues roll off your back. Live and let live.

I believed real recovery meant I could be with anyone, handle anything, and make it work. I wrestled with my hypersensitivity and hyperawareness, convinced I could recover my way out of them. I believed, like everyone told me, that I just needed to relax, to stop over-thinking and over-feeling.

So, I kept a polite distance from everyone, hiding my rich inner world, convinced I was too much, too intense. I tried to silence my incessant thoughts, battling the drill sergeant that could reduce me to tears at any moment. I begged my therapist, “When am I ever going to learn to relax?! When I’m dead??” to which she replied, “Maybe.”

I did everything they say to do: I worked the Steps, reached out to others, and took care of my inner child. I did daily affirmations, I prayed, kept a gratitude journal, and practiced reprogramming my mind with evidence-based logic and reality testing. I believed my mind was a crazed, in-house enemy—something to be fought, managed, and controlled.

The Buoy of Mindfulness

I got drawn heavily to Eastern thought and immersed myself in the promise of mindfulness. The teachings of Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tara Brach, and Jack Kornfield became my companions. Their words pointed to a quieter, more grounded way of being, one that promised liberation from the relentless chatter of my mind.

Through mindfulness and meditation, I began learning to detach from my thoughts, observing them without taking them so personally. Now my mind was more like a rogue, wild animal—but one I could befriend and gently corral through patient observation.

At first, this approach brought some relief. But time and again, I was met with the maddening frustration of never achieving lasting calm, and repeatedly paralyzed by shame. It seemed others were finding bliss while I had found a haunted house. This was becoming increasingly problematic the more I moved out into the world. The bigger I got, the louder and scarier it got and the more it debilitated me. I prayed desperately to be freed from the relentless psychological torture of it.

The Wake-Up Call

In 2016, my prayer was answered—but not in the way I had imagined. I doubt you’ll expect it either. Like so many others, I woke up after that election day in the U.S. with a pit in my stomach and dread on my mind. The country had elected Donald Trump, and I was in absolute shock. How could this have happened after eight years with a progressive, charming Black president who made us look and feel so good?

On my commute to work, I listened to callers on the radio processing the election results. A pattern began to emerge: Black, Brown, and Indigenous-identified people kept saying, “I’m not surprised. This is America.” There was a sharp divide along racial lines between those who felt blindsided and those who saw it as inevitable. It hit me like a slap to my white face, demanding that I wake the fuck up.

I’ll save the details of my anti-racism journey for another time, but there were a couple of pivotal moments over the next four years that I need to share. These experiences opened the door to a far deeper, embodied path of relating—to myself and to the seen and unseen realms of the world. They’re important context for understanding where I’ve been and where more of us could go, as we face the same collective shadow rearing its incredibly ugly head once again. But let me be clear: I’m not here to try and convince anyone of anything. Been there, done that.

Everywhere I Go, There I Am

Over the next year, I turned my attention from white narratives to the stories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. With my signature intense fervor, I dove into books, podcasts, workshops, circles, and different social activism. But instead of relief, I felt my insides crumbling. I didn’t feel better—I felt worse.

I lost a shit ton of friends, too. And to my great disappointment, I didn’t immediately find new ones, despite all the “good” I was doing. I mean, just imagine: Black people still wanted nothing to do with me, and white people in the movement felt like NPCs—there was no connecting with them. Little did I realize I was dragging the same deadly perfectionism and control into my anti-racism work that I had applied to everything else. I was beginning to burn out and I had no idea why.

Waking Up to Whiteness

I still remember the morning I walked out of my house with a freshly printed copy of “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun. Walking to my car, I eagerly scanned the first few paragraphs. The words grabbed me so hard that I stood riveted in my driveway, reading the rest through tears.

These characteristics were the same battles I’d been fighting for the last twenty years in my psychotherapy and recovery work! My mind was blown as I realized they weren’t just a reflection of my dysfunctional family of origin, but that my culture of origin had shaped me just as insidiously—and perhaps even more completely.

Being white and anti-racist suddenly meant that the work ahead wasn’t just about catching myself in racist thoughts, or reeducating myself on uncensored U.S. history or the lives of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. My racial problem couldn’t be fixed by diving into anti-racist activism, driven by guilt and a desperate need to reform the broken system and make the horror of racism vanish as quickly as possible.

With all that “good intention” fueling my engines, I began to think that perhaps I’d been causing more harm than good. Plus, I was burning through energy I couldn’t sustain. I was going to have to slow waaaay down and take a step back, to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy and go deeper. Much deeper.

I needed to re-examine my own psychology through an anti-racist lens, and question how I had approached everything in my life—even the parts that seemed, at first glance, unrelated to race. I was grateful for the tools I had to undertake this kind of psychic surgery, but I was stepping into uncharted territory.

A Radical Reorientation

After three years of deeper psychological work and countless frustrating attempts to educate other white people about these connections, I reached yet another pivotal moment in my recovery. It was the very early months of the pandemic, and the horrific murder of George Floyd was unfolding into the Summer of Racial Reckoning. My social feeds were flooded with the voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, speaking of the pervasive state violence against their bodies, the exhausting toll of daily indignities, and the urgent need for radical rest and care.

At the same time, I had just started reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, learning how white supremacy shapes even white bodies. My mind understood the concept—I’d recognized the existence of perpetrator trauma before—but I hadn’t yet felt it in my body. I felt curious and a bit unsettled. Where had I been all this time?

That same week, two baby hawks appeared in our backyard, using it as their training ground—an extraordinary sight born of the stillness of the pandemic. The hawks brought the lesson home—literally. I realized I’d have to throw myself out there, awkwardly, and learn to fly with it.

I needed a radical reorientation, one that reckoned with the role of my body in this larger system. The very next day, an ad for a workshop called “Embodied Activism” appeared in my feed, and I signed up. Days later, I began working with a coach who helped me create an embodiment practice.

Practice and Embodied Awakening

The more I practiced, the more I was shocked to realize that, for most of my life, I hadn’t truly inhabited my body. I had no idea the damage I was causing by postponing tending to its basic needs—food, water, rest—along with the need for less stimulation and more space.

I treated these signals as inconveniences or rewards for later, after I’d “earned” them by working hard enough or finishing “just this one thing.” If I become aware of discomfort or fear, I bypassed it, just as I had done with unsafe people. Push through, I told myself. Get tougher. You’ll be stronger and less afraid for it. You’ll build character. No pain, no gain. Ignoring these signals for decades has taken its toll.

I was also coming to terms with how my disembodiment made me, at the very least, an annoying nuisance and, at worst, a complicit bystander—and even a danger—to others. My lack of presence, denial, need for control, and misguided ideas of helpfulness had impacts far beyond me. Codependency and white saviorism are among the most destructive forces on this planet, and I know I’ll be making amends for my behaviors for as long as I live.

Beneath the pushing was an unconscious desperation. My body had been pleading for relief, speaking through the “depressive episodes” and “nervous breakdowns” I’d battled most of my life. Western psychology told me these were disorders, to see them as illness and to treat them with therapy and medication. But these episodes weren’t signs of weakness or disorder—they were my body’s desperate protest and attempt to save itself, to slow me down and stop the overstimulation.

I’d grown up as an athlete and a dancer, a natural mover and shaker, celebrated for my strength, skill, and discipline. If you’d asked me then, I’d have confidently said, “Of course I’m embodied.” But truthfully, I had only mastered the Western ideal of mind over matter: dominating my body, commanding it, and chasing the intoxicating high of pushing it beyond its limits.

I did this with my emotions too. Even though I had a sharp ability to articulate and analyze feelings—an empath who’d even become a psychotherapist, for gods’ sake—I’d barely scratched the surface of actually feeling them. Like my thoughts, my emotions were always an all-or-nothing deal: either I observed them from a great distance, or they overwhelmed me completely. In both cases, I treated them as a threat to be controlled, corralled, or fixed by the always-on-duty drill sergeant in my mind.

For the first time, I could see my body building real capacity for feeling—not just thinking about or analyzing what I was feeling. New safety pathways were opening, and I could allow my emotions to move through me like wind, shifting things, rearranging, and then moving on. In those moments, it felt like I was finally able to embody something I’d read countless books about and sensed only as intuition—like the invitation in Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s The Guesthouse to “welcome and entertain them all” so they could do their work.

The Pandemic Effect

It was incredible timing: just as my body was waking up, the world was shutting down. Like many, the pandemic forced us into isolation. As part of the most vulnerable population, my literal mask was non-negotiable, but at home, with my family, the psychological mask I’d worn for so long started to fall away.

The constant demand to show up in ways that weren’t authentic to me vanished. For the first time, I had the space to explore who I really was—without the male gaze, without authority figures. It was disorienting, yet liberating. Letting my body lead became the path of least resistance, and for the first time, I felt a sense of aliveness I’d only seen glimpses of before.

This awakening came from all directions, all at once. In the following months, two profoundly transformative plant medicine experiences deepened my spiritual journey. I also found an embodied community online, where I connected with embodiment teachers and also found a neurodivergent witchy spiritual advisor who reflected parts of myself I had never seen before. It felt as if everything was aligning—bringing me deeper into myself and very quickly into a new way of being in the world.

Neuroqueered

On TikTok, my world cracked wide open. I met real autists, not just the two-dimensional, pathologized depictions I had been exposed to before, and I saw myself reflected in their stories. I witnessed every color of the rainbow of gender nonconformity, and again, I saw myself—in vivid color. These experiences shattered old perceptions and allowed me to embrace parts of myself I had missed or ignored.

I’ll share more of my neuroqueer awakening another time, but this much is true: during a time of global isolation, I found myself more connected than ever—not just to others but to the person I had always been beneath the suit of armor. What I’d long ago written off as “overthinking” or “over-feeling” were a feature of my trauma responses but more so, they were essential aspects of my neurodivergence. My obsession and embodiment of the liminal in-betweens, a reflection of my queerness.

These openings brought profound relief and joy—but also deep grief. I was confronted with how much of myself I had sacrificed to performing a gender that wasn’t mine, and how “sucking it up,” had isolated me from my own being. It felt like too much energy and time had been wasted and I was often overwhelmed by the “if only’s.”

At the same time, lifelong struggles—ones I’d never been able to solve—suddenly began to click into place. Amid the grief, there was also a glimmer of something new, a sense of permission I had longed for without realizing it. A feeling that’s mirrored in the line from Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese: “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

For the first time, I was beginning to truly feel what her words meant, and learn what it means to treat my body like a beloved other. I’m still learning these truths: that the body remembers—it holds grief, it holds wisdom, it has its own language, its own yearnings, its own story, and its own timing. I am working to honor it, to respect it as I would someone I cherish, not for what it can do but for how it knows, and is.

Radical Intimacy

Suddenly too, all the frustrations I’d had about building community and white people not connecting finally began to make complete sense. My suit of armor—my body’s defenses, shaped by a terrifying childhood—had kept me safe when I needed it most. But that same armor, reinforced and praised by a culture that values control and self-denial, also cut me off from the connection I so desperately needed and wanted.

To my utter horror and amusement, I realized I had been one of those white people—the NPCs. Sure, I was friendly and eager to connect (often too much so), but my defenses and disembodiment had kept me from real connection—the kind rooted in radical intimacy. Radical intimacy isn’t something you can think your way into or perform by “baring it all” for another. It requires vulnerability, trust, and the courage to sit with discomfort long enough for it to transform—experiences that must be felt and held by a body capable of holding them.

I’m talking about the “Into Me I See” kind of intimacy, cultivated both inside and out, which isn’t inherently radical, but radical to the Western mind. I had been taught to see intimacy as something external, often confined to a sexual partner, never realizing that real intimacy is also an inside job. Also, I had to throw out my compartmentalized Western training of “inside first, then outside.” I had to embrace the practice of letting the two feed each other simultaneously—risking intimacy outwardly while deepening it inwardly, even when it feels awkward, messy, or painful.

Mind Supremacy

I now know that white supremacy is inseparable from mind supremacy—the Western mandate to elevate disembodied intellect ("I think, therefore I am") above the full spectrum of human wisdom. This paradigm suppresses, erases, and violently smothers emotional logic, relational knowing, embodied truth, and spiritual reasoning, especially in femme, queer, neurodivergent, disabled bodies and bodies of color. It upholds compartmentalization and control as virtues, creating the illusion of separation between mind, body, heart, and spirit, and denying the relational intelligence of the whole self.

White supremacy isn’t just “the water we’re swimming in”—it’s the water in every cell of our being, shaping how we live and organize ourselves in the world. But water, at its core, is life itself. It holds everything, including the capacity to change and be changed. When we shift our vibration—through embodiment, connection, and collective care—we honor water’s sacred nature and begin to transform its flow within us and between us.

In my experience, the pursuit of power through control has been one of the most disempowering and lonely paths I’ve walked. Life, in its inherent wildness, resists control with every breath. It fights back, by any means necessary, and ultimately it always wins. This feels like an undeniable truth of life’s origins, one that Western ideology betrays again and again. And that betrayal demands accountability—something my own body is now making painfully clear.

Over time, my body has learned to defend itself against the ways my mind, and Western culture, has denied its needs. I’ve found myself persistently reaching for a bigger, fuller life, even as my outer and inner critics whisper their persistent messages to stay small. I see this same dynamic reflected everywhere: in cycles of oppression and uprising, where those who are subjugated rightfully and relentlessly rise to confront what and who has harmed them, and in the natural world, where Earth herself pushes back against her threats, striving to restore balance.

Breaking the Myth of Solitary Liberation

I share my story to amplify what I’ve heard Black, Brown, and Indigenous women, femmes, and queers saying for years—now that I finally have ears to hear and eyes to see: recovering and reclaiming our true, individuated but connected selves from the imperialist patriarchal melting pot—which is, at last, melting itself— cannot be a solitary act.

So many of us want to fix the systems that harm us without acknowledging that these systems were designed to break us—fracturing our connection to each other, to ourselves, and to the land. It’s the same denial we see in dysfunctional family systems, where co-dependency on a harmful substance, behavior, or idea keeps us trapped.

We’ve been depending on people and systems that do not love us and have no interest in saving us, because they themselves don’t even see they’re being consumed. The horrifying, liberating truth is that no one is coming to save us beloved siblings. We must free ourselves. We must free each other.

The path forward lies in the wilds—beyond the illusions of control and fixing. And it starts with listening deeply to the body, as it holds the truths we’ve been taught to ignore: when we’re safe, when we’re not, when we’re in the presence of real life and love. It innately knows how to grieve, how to rest, how to feel joy. The body leads us back to the interconnected, relational web we were never meant to leave.

Capitalist-patriarchal-white supremacy taught me to worship my mind and ignore my body. It brainwashed me into thinking that disembodiment was strength and separation was safety. But I’ve learned that real strength isn’t about controlling or denying—it’s about returning, over and over. Returning to our body. To the rhythms of the Earth. To each other. Every return—to our body, to our connections, to life itself—is an act of liberation.

Embodiment has shown me how to be rooted and alive in ways I never imagined, and it is only from this rooted place that I, and we, can truly connect, create, and care. Listen, I know how awkward and foreign building a culture of care feels. I’ve been there, I am there now. I barely know what the fuck I am doing either—and I have had to face that. I have felt clumsy and small, ashamed of what I’ve ignored, and terrified of what lay ahead. But moving through that shame, returning to my body, and leaning into the wisdom of the collective has been the way forward. And it’s what we need to survive what’s coming. If you're ready, let's go together.