The Tricky Business of Being Human

I was standing at my kitchen sink this morning, washing a bowl, and I was ambushed by two completely contradictory feelings at once. The morning light was streaming in, catching the dust motes dancing in the air, and I felt a wave of the most profound, simple joy. The beauty of it all… the quiet of the house, the warmth of the water on my hands. And in the very same breath, a deep, aching grief for a friend who is struggling, for the state of our world, for a loss I thought I had long metabolized.

I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly, even if only to yourself.

Isn’t it? This beautiful, messy, magnificent, and often maddening experience of having a soul, a spirit, housed in a body, walking this earth. We are creatures of immense contradiction. We can hold soaring hope and deep despair in the same heart. We can be breathtakingly kind and shockingly cruel. We build cathedrals and we start wars. We are capable of infinite love and yet we wound the ones we love the most.

It’s so easy to feel like we’re doing it wrong. To look at the mess and the contradiction and think, I must be broken. We get the cultural message constantly that we should be happy, sorted, successful, and ever-ascending. But what if the mess isn’t a sign of failure? What if the trickiness is the whole point?

The Brain’s Beautiful, Terrible Job

Here’s a very good thing to know: your brain is not designed to make you happy. It’s designed to help you survive. That’s its number one job, a job it has been perfecting for a couple of hundred thousand years. And to do that job well, it has developed some very particular, and very tricky, habits.

One of its most powerful habits is a negativity bias. Your brain is like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones. It scans the horizon—and your inner landscape—for threats. It remembers the time you were embarrassed in a meeting far more vividly than the ten times you were praised. It replays the argument, the mistake, the moment of fear, because its primary directive is to ensure you don’t let that happen again. It’s not trying to make you miserable; it’s trying to keep you safe.

This ancient wiring, while brilliant in its evolutionary purpose, creates so much of our modern-day, quiet suffering. It builds and reinforces neural pathways—literally, connections between brain cells—that become our default settings. Think of it like carving a path in a forest. The first time you walk it, it’s slow and difficult. But the more you travel that same path, the wider and clearer it becomes, until you can walk it without thinking. This is how our patterns of anxiety, self-criticism, or fear become automatic. We create entire identities around these well-worn grooves of suffering, believing the stories our survival-brain whispers to us in the dark. See? You failed again. You’re not lovable. It’s all going to fall apart. The brain chemistry of this is real—cortisol and adrenaline flood our systems, preparing us for a fight that exists only in our minds, and this chronic state of low-grade alarm is utterly exhausting.

But here is the miracle, the beautiful truth that changes everything: you are not your brain. You are the consciousness that is aware of your brain. You are the sky, and the thoughts are just the weather. And with that awareness, you gain the power to build a new relationship with this magnificent, and sometimes maddening, three-pound universe in your head. This is the essence of neuroplasticity. The brain can change. It is designed to change. When you bring gentle, non-judgmental awareness to your patterns, you activate the higher, more evolved parts of your brain, like the prefrontal cortex. You can acknowledge your survival-brain’s intention to protect you—'Ah, thank you for trying to keep me safe'—and then gently, lovingly, choose a different path. You can consciously choose to focus on a moment of beauty, to practice gratitude, to place a hand on your heart and breathe. Each time you do this, you are beginning to walk a new path in the forest. You are forging a new neural pathway, one of peace, of self-compassion, of groundedness. It feels effortful at first, but with practice, it becomes the new default. This is the sacred work of transformation.

The Birth Canal of Transformation

I’ve come to see our challenges not as interruptions to our lives, but as the very fabric of our becoming. Every struggle, every dark night of the soul, every place where we feel stuck and lost… it is a birth canal. It is a sacred, and often painful, passage from one way of being to another.

Think of the seed. For the shoot to emerge, the seed must be completely undone. It must break apart in the dark, damp earth. It doesn’t look like progress. It looks like destruction. And yet, it is the only way for the new life to begin. Our human journey is so often like this. The moments that feel like the end are so often the beginning.

The Tao te Ching, that beautiful wellspring of ancient wisdom, speaks to this constantly. It reminds us that the softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest. That the valley, the empty space, is what makes the bowl useful. It whispers of a reality where yielding is strength, where darkness is the womb of light, and where the greatest journeys are made one small step at a time. That habit of looking at your own beautiful mess and concluding you must be broken is met kindly in this piece on the myth of having it all together, and on the freedom that arrives when the pretending stops.

When we are in the tight, dark passage of a challenge—a health crisis, a relationship ending, a career implosion—it feels like we are being crushed. It feels like a mistake. But what if it is simply the pressure of new life? What if the discomfort is the force of your own soul, pressing against the constraints of your old beliefs, your old identity, your old way of being in the world? The pain is the signal that a transformation is underway.

It’s not about figuring it out. It’s about being with it. It’s about allowing the process to unfold, trusting that the pressure is purposeful, even when you cannot see the light ahead. It is the tricky, tender work of letting yourself be remade.

My Own Tricky Business

I have spent a lifetime navigating this tricky business. For years, I lived in a state of quiet, chronic anxiety, my nervous system wired for high alert from a childhood where it learned that the world was not a reliably safe place. I became a master of control, of performance, of trying to be perfect and good enough to finally earn a sense of safety. My body was screaming at me for decades, through migraines and exhaustion, but I didn’t yet know how to listen. I thought my body was the problem.

My own birth canal was a long and winding one. It wasn’t a single, dramatic event, but a slow, patient, and often deeply uncomfortable turning towards myself. For years, I lived in a state of quiet, chronic anxiety, my nervous system wired for high alert from a childhood where it learned that the world was not a reliably safe place. I became a master of control, of performance, of trying to be perfect and good enough to finally earn a sense of safety. My body was screaming at me for decades, through migraines, digestive issues, and a profound, bone-deep exhaustion, but I didn’t yet know how to listen. I thought my body was the problem, a betrayer to be managed and overcome.

The real shift began not when I tried to fix myself, but when I started to listen. It was the slow, patient work of sitting with the discomfort. Of learning to meet the churning anxiety in my stomach not with resistance, but with a gentle curiosity. Hello there. What are you trying to tell me? It was the radical act of placing a hand on my own heart in the middle of the night and whispering, I am here with you. This is hard. You are not alone. It was the work of tracing the patterns back to their roots, not to create a story of blame, but to cultivate a field of profound compassion. To see the little girl who learned she had to be vigilant to survive, and to wrap her in the love and safety she always deserved.

It was, and still is, the work of neuroplasticity in action. Every time I chose to pause instead of react, to breathe instead of brace, I was carving a new neural pathway. I was telling my brain, my body, my entire being, that a new reality was possible. A reality where I could be both strong and soft, where my worth was not tied to my doing, and where my body was not an enemy to be conquered but a sacred messenger to be revered.

There is such an exquisite beauty in this. The beauty is not in arriving at a place of perfect, perpetual peace. The beauty is in the relationship you build with your own messy, magnificent self. It’s in the moment you can look at your own contradictions—your fear and your courage, your doubt and your faith—and hold them all with love. It’s in the growing trust that you can handle the trickiness, that you have the resilience to navigate the birth canals, and that you are held by a love that is so much bigger than your mind can comprehend.

This human experience is a profound gift. It is a chance to feel everything—the heart-stopping joy and the heart-wrenching sorrow. It is an invitation to transform our deepest wounds into our greatest wisdom. It is a journey of coming home to the truth of who we are, beneath the stories, beneath the patterns, beneath the noise of the survival-brain.

You are not broken. You have never been broken. You are a soul on a magnificent, and yes, a very tricky, journey. Be gentle with yourself. The mess is part of the magic.

With infinite love and support on your journey, Susan