No More Performance: What If Your Healing Didn’t Have to Be Pretty?
Let’s be honest: healing has become its own performance art. We’re out here trying to become emotionally regulated, spiritually ascended, and aesthetically pleasing all at once—while holding down jobs, processing trauma, and not screaming in Target. (Or screaming, but, you know, softly. Into a gratitude journal.)
The Cult of “Calm Down”
We’ve been sold the idea that healing = serenity. Cue the soft lighting, white yoga mats, perfectly timed exhale. But for many of us—especially femmes, neurodivergent folks, fat bodies, queer bodies, disabled bodies—that’s not healing. That’s suppression in a sports bra.
Breathwork is beautiful. Until it becomes a muzzle.
Sometimes you don’t need to calm the fuck down. You need to scream. You need to shake. You need to feel the full fire of your rage before it calcifies into shame.
Rage Is Not a Regression
Anger is not a sign you’re failing at healing—it’s a sign your body is finally telling the truth. In a world where emotional repression is gendered, racialized, and capitalized, rage is resistance. Grief is rebellion. Mess is sacred.
The nervous system doesn’t always want to be soothed. Sometimes it wants to complete the cycle. Not with '3 deep breaths' but with a full-body primal fuck-you to the systems that taught us we had to be palatable to be lovable.
Who Gets to Heal?
Let’s talk about access. Most wellness spaces are not built for all bodies. They’re built for bendy white women with money, time, and the right kind of trauma. Try being in a larger body, or a mobility-impaired one, or one that doesn’t speak yoga-fluent, and see how welcome you feel.
We don’t need more candlelit cacao circles that center aesthetics over accessibility. We need spaces where grief can be loud, rage can be messy, and healing doesn’t require you to audition for the role of 'spiritually evolved.'
The Vibe Police Can Suck It
'You’re vibrating too low' is not feedback—it’s elitist spiritual bullshit wrapped in a hemp shawl.
You are not broken because you’re angry, confused, stuck, or tired. You are not 'less evolved' because your nervous system still flinches. You’re human. You’re in process. You’re fucking brave.
This week, we’re burning the script.
Not replacing it with a new one. Not performing new-age palatability. Just letting your body, your grief, your rage, your joy—all of it—have the mic for once.
🔥 Want to go deeper? This week’s podcast episodes crack this wide open: one dives into the neuroscience of rage and healing, the other goes off on spiritual elitism and aesthetic wellness exclusion. Plus, two worksheets in The Ember Vault are waiting to help you reclaim your messy, magnificent, real-ass healing path.
Let’s stop performing. Let’s get free.
