Remember by Forgetting
7 minute read
It’s funny how not living will make you feel like you want to die. And how living fully will sometimes require you to die over and over again.
This piece might make some people uncomfortable, and I’ve made peace with that.
For most of my life, I’ve expressed myself with one eye on the crowd, measuring how my truth might land, how it might be received, and how it might ripple back toward me.
But I’m at a point in my remembering where I want to forget how to please and appease. I no longer want to shape-shift into some makeshift idea of safety. I want to speak in full color, even if it unsettles what’s been comfortable for others. Even if my inner child trembles at how honesty might hurt her again.
Late this summer, the same intuition that’s guided me through every threshold whispered, “Let’s pause. It’s time to stop performing wellness and actually live it.”
So, as I normally do a few times a year, I quietly stepped away for a break from showing up online.
I didn’t know how long it would last. I didn’t know it would unravel almost everything I’d built. I just knew I couldn’t keep showing up from a version of myself that was splitting at the seams. I didn’t know it would become a descent.
The same eclipse season that darkened the sky began rearranging me from the inside out. It ravaged my roles and routines, revealing how many of them were built on the belief that I had to earn my worth through usefulness.
Like many first-generation kids of immigrants, I’ve struggled with this for what feels like my entire life, but this time the lesson felt…bigger. Final. Like it needed to stick.
For weeks, I’ve assisted the energy of the moment in tearing open and deeply examining. And albeit painful and full of shame, I’ve (re)discovered valuable truths…and lies.
For one, I thought my way of living was honoring my devotion to growth, but what I was really doing was overexerting a nervous system that hadn’t known rest in decades. I was still chasing the same old story: that I am one of God’s “strongest soldiers,” chosen for difficulty, built to endure.
It’s a seductive lie, especially for those of us who romanticize resilience. Astrology, human design, ancestry…they all seemed to confirm it, too. My chart says I was born for transformation. My lineage says I was born to break cycles. My trauma says, “See? Even the stars agree. Keep pushing through. No pare, sigue sigue!”
But there’s a fine line between expansion and punishment.
When you believe your suffering is sacred, you start mistaking endurance for purpose. You start calling exhaustion devotion. I didn’t realize how addicted I was to my pain until my body refused to carry it anymore. The inflammation, the fatigue, the fog I’m currently experiencing feels like my body’s rebellion. Its way of saying, “we can’t keep living like this.”
Being so resourced with knowledge, routines, and certifications, I tried to fix it with every wellness practice I knew. But realizing that I’m past the point of managing it away, I was forced to face a truth I’d avoided for years:
The issue isn’t my discipline, it’s my devotion to control.
I’ve been using “healing” as a way to prove that I was okay. When I gave myself the space to stop, I realized that I also stopped pretending. I finally let myself collapse, and what surfaced was grief in waves bigger than I could manage. And beneath that grief, rage.
Rage for all the ways I betrayed myself for belonging. Rage for how long I mistook perfection for peace. Rage for how at the root of this, was a little girl who didn’t know any better and created these false truths to keep herself safe.
I’ve spent more than a decade guiding others back to themselves. helping them remember who they are, and what’s true beneath the noise. But this time, I was the one who felt lost in it.
When I paused enough to really listen in, I could feel my truth humming under my skin, but I couldn’t reach it through all the titles and projections that had built up around my work.
Teacher, healer, guide, expert. Somewhere along the way, I became the very thing I tried to protect others from…a woman performing authenticity in all the right ways.
I’m not reading “self-help” books or listening to any podcasts prompting these realizations or “clarity bombs,” as I call them. I’ve been a student of life and well-being long enough to recognize a pattern when I see one. And, thanks to undiagnosed neurodivergence, I recognize them everywhere.
The clarity doesn’t arrive when I’m meditating or journaling, it lands in the most ordinary moments. While I’m making breakfast, washing my hair, walking my dog, etc. It’s as if when my nervous system is freed from constant production, it finally has space to let wisdom through.
And yes, I still receive insights in meditation, but they’ve become rarer. Over the past two years, even my spiritual practice started to feel like work. A place where I was producing clarity for myself and for the collective. With everything intensifying in the world and in my own life, I had turned even stillness into labor, ultimately clouding my channel.
So when I sat down to write yet another bio for an offering I was taking part in, a paragraph I’d written countless times before, full of the usual words: “multidisciplinary sacred artist,” “mind-body-spirit educator,” “intentional living guide,” this time, the language felt like a layer of armor I had outgrown.
That feeling wasn’t new. It carried me straight back to the little girl I was in Catholic school, the one who felt eyes on her all the time.
I can still feel her clearly. The daughter of the teacher, the honor student, the “good girl.” The one taught that holiness and goodness were the same thing. The one who learned that to be good meant to be quiet, polite, intelligent, and obedient. That safety depended on compliance. That love was conditional.
My teachers praised me. My family was proud. And my nervous system learned to equate performance with belonging.
Years later, standing on stages, posting for thousands, and teaching wellness, I’ve realized that in many ways, I am still that girl. Well-behaved, articulate, terrified to disappoint.
The language had changed, but the way I showed up hadn’t. The wellness industry had become my new Catholic school, with its own codes of conduct and hierarchy of holiness.
I learned its doctrines and abided by them. How to study different truths and perspectives but make sure I sound enlightened. How to honor my journey but make sure I look grounded and whole. How to share vulnerably without being too raw. I didn’t realize how much it cost me until I finally felt empty enough to notice the debt it had created in my spirit.
For five years, I led a virtual membership community that served wellness practices and resources to more than five hundred women over its time. I poured myself into it, believing I was living in my purpose, but when I closed it in March 2024 and stopped teaching in the way I had for years, I thought I was walking away from everything that defined me. What I didn’t expect was how much truth I’d find in the silence that followed.
It was in that solitude that I began to see how much of my life had been lived in reaction to invisible expectations — my own and everyone else’s. And I began to notice the mirrors all around. How my clients were reflecting the same unraveling. So many people in my containers and Alignment Sessions were asking the same questions that echoed through me:
Who am I when I’m not being watched? What parts of me are still trying to earn love through control, through performance, through presentation?
What I know for sure is that it isn’t just us. The entire world is in what feels like a vortex of recalibration. Systems, governments, corporations, communities, all of it facing the same mirror. Everything we’ve built has been born out of the same programming. To survive, to achieve, to dominate, to please.
Some people-please for safety. Some dominate for power. Some hide behind righteousness or religion. Others destroy for greed. But beneath it all is the same pattern: Humans operating through the wounds of their child selves, trying to feel safe in a world that has forgotten how to nurture true safety.
(Mostly because a world full of people who feel unsafe is easier to control, and far more profitable. But the effects of capitalism on consciousness are a conversation for another day.)
And albeit painful and awful in so many disgusting ways, at the root of it, this collective reckoning feels divinely orchestrated. Because to rebuild anything rooted in truth, we first have to admit what’s false. We have to stop confusing our conditioning for our character.
The invitation isn’t just to change what we do, but to look at who we are while we do it. To keep what’s true, release what’s outdated, and forgive how we learned to operate in survival.
That’s what this season has been showing me in ways I haven’t seen it positioned before. That I’m safe to admit that in many ways, I’m living out of survival. That survival and living are not the same thing. That control is not devotion. That perfection has never been peace.
In my stillness, I’ve tried to start creating again. Not from obligation, but from impulse. I realized I had grown resentful of creating because I learned to turn it into proof of my talent, my worth, and relevance. And when the validation fades, I mistake the silence for failure. I think the world has stopped listening when, in truth, Spirit is just asking me to express myself differently.
Now, I’m trying to create the way breath moves through the body…naturally, intuitively, without asking for permission. Writing, drawing, filming, mothering, moving, whatever form truth wants to take, I’m vowing to let it. Some will live online, and some will be just for me. I’m promising myself to stop trying to make art that saves me or the world. To stop trying, period.
In a world that tells artists to create what feels good, my inner child feels shame because we’re unlearning what “good” really means. So instead of creating what feels good, but I’m choosing to focus on creating what feels true.
And maybe that’s what this whole remembering thing is about. Not becoming better, but becoming more and more honest. Not mastering a new identity, but releasing the ones that were built out of a need to feel safe.
Maybe liberation isn’t about transcending the “negative” parts of the human experience, but about fully living inside all of it, gently and without apology. These are things I’ve said to my clients and through my art countless times before, but now, I’m finally embodying them for myself.
I also know that beginning again will take time, patience, and the courage to be vulnerable. Not just within the walls of my apartment, but in the unboundaried expanse of the wild, wild internet. Part of me knows that my truth, my art, are necessary out in the world. That there is space for me, even if my ego continues to convince me otherwise.
Right now, I am between the undoing and the becoming. Living with beginner’s mind, creating from the middle again. Letting the wisdom of my body and spirit speak in whatever language they choose. Trusting that honesty will always be enough light to find the way forward.
And maybe that’s all any of us are being asked to do right now. To pause, to look at the patterns we’ve inherited, and to decide which ones we’re still willing to live and create by.
Because the world is shifting at the speed of truth, and every one of us is being called to meet it. Not as performers or perfectionists, but as humans remembering, out loud, together.
Thank you for reading. I intentionally share my writing freely, without a paywall. If you read something in this piece that moved you and you’d like to support my work, you can do so here. Your support, in any form, helps me continue creating. Much love.