This morning, on my birthday, I was leaning against the kitchen sink of an Airbnb, half awake, waiting for the kettle, when a smell reached me. Sweet and sour and faintly rotten. My first thought arrived: Why do I smell so bad? I must be detoxing something heavy.
I stood there and catalogued my own body… “must be the strong tea I’m drinking bringing things to the surface”… and so I smelt myself.
Then I stayed a little longer. I let my nose do what noses do, and I followed the smell to its source. A dead beetle, belly up in the corner of the sink, quietly composting into the stainless steel.
I laughed. And then I stopped laughing, because the beetle had asked me a question I have been circling all year.
The reflex
Why do I always assume the smell is coming from me?
Why is my first instinct to search my own inner realms for the source of what feels wrong, before I so much as glance at the room I am standing in, or the people standing in it with me?
It is an incidental moment. A beetle. An Airbnb. Yet the body rarely wastes a metaphor, and this one landed something I had been sitting with alL morning as a harvest and teaching on the morning I turned thirty-seven.
Where the reflex was born
When you grow up in a household where there is constant friction in the basement of people's psyches, and no avenue to name it, discuss it, or make sense of it together, the friction finds somewhere to go. Usually it goes into the child.
Children are exquisite sensors. We feel the pressure drop before the storm. We read the jaw, the silence at dinner, the way a door is closed. When no one around us is willing to say what is happening, we do the only thing available to us: we take it inside and try to metabolise it ourselves. We become the processing plant for a family's unspoken material.
And because a child's world is still self-referential, the conclusion we draw is almost always the same. If something feels wrong, it must be me. If there is a smell in the house, it must be coming from my own body.
This is internalisation as survival, and it is intelligent. It kept many of us safe. When you cannot change the weather, you become very, very good at reading it, and at adjusting yourself to it.
The gift inside the wound
I want to honour what this pattern gave me, because it has given me my life's work.
Children who internalise grow into adults with extraordinary pattern recognition. We sense the faintest asymmetry in a room, in a body, in a voice. We track the threads of what is unsaid. Much of what I do as a practitioner, the reading of the body, the listening beneath symptoms, the intuitive mapping of where something is held, is the refined and matured expression of that little girl at the dinner table, quietly decoding everyone.
The wound and the gift share a root system. I have no interest in amputating one to be rid of the other.
Every gift carries its own shadow, though, and the shadow of exquisite pattern recognition is this: we start finding the pattern inside ourselves even when it lives somewhere else. We become so practised at self-examination that we forget the environment is also a variable. We surrogate for other people's unprocessed material, carrying it, composting it, calling it our own detox, while the true source sits in plain sight on the edge of the sink.
When inner work becomes a hiding place
There is a trap waiting for those of us drawn to healing, spirituality and self-development. Inner work becomes the answer to everything. Feel something off? Journal on it. Breathe into it. Find your projection, your trigger, your unhealed wound. Ask what this is mirroring in you.
These are beautiful practices. I teach many of them. And they can also become an elegant way to avoid a far simpler, far more confronting truth: sometimes the problem is outside of you. Sometimes the person in front of you is draining you. Sometimes the environment is toxic. Sometimes you are being leached from, and no amount of shadow work will change that, because the shadow you are working on belongs to someone else.
The spiritual version of the internalising child keeps doing the inner work long after the inner work is done. She keeps cleaning a house that is already clean, while someone else keeps tracking mud through the door.
This has been my lesson for this year. A brutal one that has resulted in the closing off of many connections that have been based on extraction, rather than reciprocity.
The harvest of thirty-seven
This has been the harvest of my year. Learning to discern.
Learning to sit with a feeling long enough to locate its true source before I decide what it means. Learning to ask, Is this mine? and then, crucially, being willing to hear the answer when it is no.
Learning when to stop processing and start protecting. When to put down the journal and pick up the boundary. When the most healing act available is a closed door, a clear sentence, a decision to stop being the place where other people's material goes to decompose.
This discernment is subtle work. The internaliser's nervous system will often read a boundary as aggression, as a failure of compassion, or as spiritual immaturity. Surely if I were more evolved I could hold this. I have come to believe that a mature spirituality includes the capacity to say, with love and without apology, this is not mine to carry.
Looking up
So here is what the beetle gave me on my birthday.
When you smell something off, pause before you turn the search inward. Let your senses travel. Look at the room. Look at the sink. Look at who has been standing in your kitchen and what they left behind.
Your pattern recognition is a gift. Point it outward too. The environment is part of the diagnosis. The people around you are part of the field. And sometimes the most profound piece of self-knowledge you will receive is the simple, liberating recognition that the smell was never coming from you at all.
It was a beetle. It was always a beetle.
I carried it out to the garden, and then I made my tea.
loveeeee this
I truly enjoyed this peace . Thank you for sharing so relevant . 💚