Rooted in Rough Ground

Woman With a Rake by Jean FranÇois Millet

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Some days I feel like I’m standing inches from a mental precipice—pushed there by an internal, existential exhaustion. Like I woke up, unaware that overnight, a lightswitch had flipped—plunging me into darkness.

Other days, I make tea in the morning as usual and wonder if that edge ever really existed at all.

Was it just a dream?

Am I being overly dramatic?

Did someone else live in my body for a day?

Or worse—am I losing my mind?

Is this normal?

We don’t talk nearly enough about how to navigate life when there’s a storm raging back and forth inside of us. Or about the strange calm that often follows internal chaos, sometimes even just a day later—

not quite peace,

but a release,

like a shipwreck survivor’s collective sigh:

“We survived another one.”

Not all storms rip your house apart or leave visible damage. Many rage quietly inside, hidden behind carefully crafted barricades. Often not because we want to hide them, but because we have to. We put on brave faces at times, carrying on even when we feel like we're sleepwalking through a tornado.

I’ve learned to try and trust the calm after the storm.

To sit in it.

To let myself breathe, without looking to make sense of it all.

Because I know I'll need my strength for the next storm.

I’ve learned to trust not the storm itself,

but that it will pass—if I stop fighting it.

If I just let it be.

(And, most days, I’m pretty sure I’m not losing my mind.)

That's the thing—no one talks about what healing looks like in real time.

Healing might be considered the pièce de résistance—the winning rose bush in a beautiful garden. But we rarely talk about what it looks like when we still have to keep going.

What it takes for the roses to blossom.

What if the roots become infested,

do we just put a pot over it

and hope the problem will go away?

Sometimes the people around us mean well, but their emotional constellations are like galaxies flinging stars and fiery debris through our landscape—never still, rarely quiet, never quite safe enough to just feel or be.

Always wanting to cover things with more pots.

Maybe we learned early on to avoid the painful truth of being human:

Feeling like shit doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Sitting in it was never modelled.

Sitting in it was never the strategy.

I was raised on the well-meaning ethos,

“Don’t let this define you.”

And most of us hear that and think,

“No, I won’t be defined by the bad things that happened to me.”

But stop and think:

If we’re not letting our experiences, and how we face them, define us,

then what are we doing?

I know the heart behind the phrase:

“Don’t let this destroy you. You are worth the fight.”

So why don’t we say it out loud?

Because what we often hear instead is:

“Don’t let your pain be real or lasting.”

But the unspoken truth is:

sometimes pain does define us,

shapes us,

changes us,

and that’s part of the human experience—

not a failure or something to be ashamed of.

Sometimes we hear those words spoken to us when no one can hear ours. When others can’t relate to the inner world behind our story, even if we say it clearly. Often, it’s because they cannot face their own pain, their own inner turmoil, so they are unable to look at ours.

I recently watched The Quilters on Netflix—a very moving documentary about a group of men in prison, serving life sentences for very serious crimes, who spend their days making patchwork quilts for foster children.

Not only were the quilts skillfully made and beautiful, but the men themselves were warm, gentle, empathetic, funny, kind, and deeply reflective.

And yes, I found myself thinking what everyone probably does:

“But you’re dangerous?”

"You've caused irrepairable suffering."

"Where is that part of you now?"

It's not that I’ve ever believed people in prison are devoid of humanity or not worth redemption. I even wrote my final-year dissertation on whether personality traits affected opinions about the death penalty, hoping to prove that it did—with the implication that it is too fallible a system. (Disappointingly, no link. I suspect my SPSS skills were to blame.)

All the men in The Quilters had serious crimes behind them.

And yet there they were—beaming with pride, holding up the enormous quilts they’d painstakingly crafted, explaining the complex maths behind all those squares that I had no chance of keeping up with.

What stood out wasn’t just their craftsmanship—it was their introspection.

At one point, two of them talked about accountability, and how much they wished they were the people they are now, back then.

How much suffering would have been avoided.

The deep, heavy regret they carry about what their actions caused—

both to others and their own lives.

And in that process of inner searching—facing themselves—they allowed their mistakes to define them in a beautiful, soul-searching way—and they became much, much more emotionally and spiritually healthy people for it.

(Apart from the guy with the razor, maybe.

He took a wrong turn.

As do we all, sometimes.)

It’s hard to feel soft when we're hurting so much.

It's hard to forgive.

But as these incarcerated men very aptly pointed out—

you can't forgive others until you've learned how to forgive yourself.

Does that heal the lives they took or ruined?

The people who still see their faces whilst terrified in the dark?

No.

Of course not.

But both truths—both experiences—can exist side by side.

That’s an extreme example, but it shows how regret and deeply painful and destructive actions and experiences can define us—

even the things beyond our control.

And the things we regret?

Believe me, we all have those.

But I've heard plenty of people who say they don't.

To that, I would say that there are parts of ourselves that we all struggle to face. I sometimes still face parts of myself from twenty years ago. But isn't that the essence of healing from our experiences?

Accepting those parts of ourselves?

Facing them?

Befriending them?

Listening to them?

Not all parts of you are going to agree. In fact, that's the problem. They don't. We carry all these parts around with us, and when things feel overwhelming, sometimes those other parts get in the driver's seat.

Because we haven't learned to get to know them.

We haven't learned to hold their hand on the precipice, yet.

If any of this feels familiar—the storm, the quiet calm after, the weight of regret—maybe it’s time for a conversation.

Sometimes the gentlest step forward is simply to be heard.

We may not be making quilts in a prison yard,

but we’re all stitching something back together—

memory by memory,

moment by moment,

storm by storm.