I'm tired of fixing myself

As you breathe into your body, notice. Scanning from the crown of your head, slowly down into the neck, your shoulders, your limbs, your torso, down your legs and into your feet...notice. Is there a small tickle in your throat? An impending headache behind your eyes? Does your spine ache from shoveling snow? Do you remember how to feel the backs of your knees?

Pay attention to your emotional body, too. Where does the nervousness reside? If you could pinpoint the constant thrum of low-level anxiety, where would it land inside you? Where do you feel it? More importantly, what's to be done about it?

We don't want to judge the sensations or the feelings, but various sources have given us information on how to deal with them. I've heard that trauma is stored in our hips. Waking up to jump in place and shake our limbs will reset our nervous systems. Somatic dance might unlock years of unprocessed pain, and has done for some people what years of therapy couldn't. If we want to feel our best, we should drink half a liter of water just after opening our eyes in the morning - even better if we can have it hot with lemon and apple cider vinegar. We'd be a lot less tired if we committed to being asleep by 10 and awake with the sunrise. No pets in the bed, either. We'd maintain a youthful glow if we'd get 10,000 steps in, introduce a retinol and sunscreen, and keep our phones out of the bedroom, every single day. We don't want to give meaning to every single feeling.

But by God, will we drum up and dole out a solution for every single one imaginable.

What I really feel is tired. A soul-level tired that won't go away with a few good nights of sleep. No - this is the kind of fatigue that has been built up from years of global crises stacking up onto one another, straight onto our backs. Too large to see, but the weight is massive, indescribable and crushing. Then there's the level of worry for the future - a list of events that do not yet exist, and therefore do not weigh anything at all, but the mere thought of them will reflexively tense the shoulders and close off connection to warmth, to vulnerability. It puts us in full defense. So while we carry the impossible heaviness of the present, we also brace for an uncertain day, year, lifetime ahead.

This is where it stems from, I assure you. This is the "secret" thing that keeps us all exhausted and not feeling our best. But the latest internet health advisors, be they self-titled wellness coaches or just regular, everyday people, want to label the symptoms in terms we recognize and can deal with more easily: bad sleep habits, not enough movement, too much screen time.

Just like most women my age, I've also been hyper-fixated on Heated Rivalry lately, and I only bring it up now because I'm reminded of a subtly profound quote Rose Landry says to Shane when he comes out to her, the first person he's ever admitted his feelings to. She says, "It's not a problem. A problem is something you can fix."

So to all the wellness advice you'll find on social media in 2026, I say the same thing: The weight of the world and the anxiety of the future is not a problem. Sure, we can fix our sleep, our skincare routines, our posture, our diets. But none of it will take that weight off, because a problem is something you can fix. No nervous system reset is going to eradicate ICE. No somatic dance detox is going to bring home the neighbors they've kidnapped. Only intense, collective action and systemic change can do that, and that's outside of ourselves.

We're still left with the overwhelming exhaustion and the constant need to solve it, to self-optimize. Every silent groan from our aching shoulders is a reminder that something is wrong, something needs tending to, we are not performing at our highest ability. We're more likely to "crash out" in this state, whether it be internally or toward loved ones. The restlessness catches up to us until we genuinely feel like the worst version of ourselves. And it's not selfish to want to fix that, to do the work of self-improvement. It's actually one of the traits I find most beautiful in humans - that we are always, fervently, desperately, at-all-costs, trying to do better.

But the problems and solutions are mismatched.

Because we are so hypervigilant for bodily signs of unease, every sensation becomes information. Every feeling becomes a task. It all lines up to a prescribed list of supplements, diet changes, stretches, meditative focuses that we can find from any limitless number of accounts on the internet. ChatGPT could certainly give us a laundry list of tasks, routines, or hacks to try. And then we'll blame ourselves when nothing works and the alarm bells continue ringing inside of us.

And this is the problem that actually can be fixed: We're trying to regulate a system that must live under conditions we can't individually improve. Of course we're dysregulated, soul-level tired...we live in a rapidly accelerating timeline of hyper-capitalism, authoritarianism, care only for the 1% and complete disregard for all other lifeforms. Our natural environment is collapsing. World leaders are scrambling to keep us all from mass chaos. Of course the self-improvement regiments aren't working. Sometimes I think the only thing that would is the deepest wailing cry straight into the soil of a forest - one that rumbles the trees and sends the birds flying off in concern. Who else is going to hear? Who else wants to receive this load, to take it off our shoulders for even just a few moments?

We're not "failing" at self-care. We simply live in a time that often feels finite, and we can't meditate out of that feeling. We can't self-soothe through ongoing instability and injustice. Our individual wellness is inherently political. And the messaging is unfortunately still abundantly available to say that our existential stressors can be commodified into personal maintenance tasks.

What if the solution to this problem (the one that can be fixed) isn't to eliminate tension, but to stop treating the pain like a personal failure? What if we allowed the body to be an honest response to simply living through too much? Sometimes our days, our bodies act as mirrors to the heaviness and bleakness of the world around us - no more explanation required. Counter to the endless swaths of internet advice, I have heard some practitioners say it's imperative to not try to interpret every single sensation, to perhaps not even give them attention at all. This acts as a gentle reminder to rebel against the trend of self-optimization. Shockingly to some of us, there is actually nothing wrong with having a 30-year-old body that experiences chronic fatigue. That's just called getting older.

It's not the glamorous, miraculous answer most of us are searching for, I know. But it's the truth. The solution to our discomfort is to allow it - to embrace it, even. We don't want to be impacted, exhausted, grieving all the time...but we're allowed to be. It's counterintuitive to say that the solution to our pain is more pain, but I do think there's a lot of truth to it. It's temporary pain that comes when we allow the walls to come down for a bit. Even the thought of doing so feels like too much, but if we can permit ourselves to go there, it may actually alchemize into a newfound sense of connectedness we didn't know was possible. We're letting reality really set in, but with that comes the warmth and vulnerability and humanity we've been desperately craving this whole time. Maybe that's the medicine.

It's the kind of solution that doesn't sell well on social media - crying in the dark, then calling a friend to talk about it. Going for a silent walk the next day, and paying more attention to the things we may have forgotten about for a while. Passing strangers and wondering if they're doing the same thing. These are solutions that can't be shown or sold, but can just as easily be done. And maybe the pain doesn't fully go away.

But maybe we learn something anyway. Maybe the next time we do a body scan, we don't ask "What's wrong?" Instead, we accept that there is no requirement or immediacy here. It's just the want to live, and feel mostly good while we do.