You Were Never Broken

What if the body already knew what the diagnosis was trying to say?

The bear does not apologise for sleeping through winter.

It does not schedule a session to work through its shutdown response. It does not journal about its functional freeze. It does not set an alarm to force itself back into productivity before the thaw. It simply goes still, goes deep, and trusts that something in its blood knows what the season requires.

We used to know this too.

What if some of what we've named as disorder is actually the body doing precisely what it was designed to do — and we've simply forgotten how to read the instructions?

I am not trying to dismiss therapy, or diagnosis, or the real and serious suffering that people carry (and the very real changes that people experience in therapy). I love therapy and it is emotional self care, for me.

This isn't a dismissal of therapy — it's a question that sits alongside it.

This is a question that sits alongside it, one that is with me when I notice the language we’ve built around inner experience — the clinical scaffolding we place around states that every other living thing moves through wordlessly.

Consider grief. When a tree loses its leaves, we don’t call it depressed. We call it Autumn. The shedding is not a malfunction, it is the tree redirecting its energy inward, releasing what it can no longer sustain, preparing for what’s coming next. Biologists call this abscission. It is orderly, necessary, beautiful in its own austere way.

Human grief does something structurally similar a tree shedding it’s leaves in Autumn. It empties us, it strips away. It forces a kind of inward withdrawal that the world around us often reads as dysfunction. We have built entire frameworks around moving through it faster, resolving it, returning the person to prior capacity. But prior capacity was built for a life that no longer exists. The grief is not the problem. The grief is the process by which a self remakes itself around a new reality. The tree in winter is not a broken tree. It is a tree in winter.

Consider anxiety. A meerkat stands at the edge of the burrow and scans the horizon. Its whole nervous system is lit up, alert, broadcasting a silent alarm to every nearby creature: something might be coming. We do not diagnose the meerkat with generalised anxiety disorder. We recognise it as a sentinel doing its job — a creature evolved over millions of years to notice threat before threat notices it.

The human nervous system running on high alert is, often, doing the same thing. It learned its vigilance for a reason. The problem is not the alarm system. The problem is that the threat it was calibrated for may no longer be present — and no one has told the body that the war is over. What we call anxiety is, in another light, a loyalty to survival. An ancient intelligence that loved us too much to stop watching.

Consider burnout. In traditional agriculture, a field left fallow was not a failed field. It was a field being trusted. Farmers understood that soil which gives without receiving will eventually give nothing. Rest was not idleness. The fallow period was when the invisible work happened: the microbes, the minerals, the slow restoration of what had been taken. You could not rush it without destroying the very capacity you were trying to restore.

We speak of burnout as collapse. But perhaps it is closer to fallow. The body refusing to continue depleting what has already been spent. Not a breakdown, but a boundary. Not failure, but a refusal to continue to engage in something that will not nourish us. The organism doing what organisms do when they have given beyond their replenishment.

The living world does not pathologise its seasons. It does not call winter a disorder, or drought a personal failing, or dormancy a deficiency of character.

I had the honour of witnessing and observing this phenomena, growing up on a small island, where time stood still and I spent most of my days, immersed in nature: the generator power went off during the day, we didn’t have technology and our circadian rhythms were synchronised to nature. This is why this topic is so close to home, for me.

And none of this means the suffering isn't real. It is. The freeze is real. The grief is real. The exhaustion is real. But there is a difference between suffering and brokenness. And somewhere along the way — in our very reasonable attempt to name pain in order to treat it — we may have started to collapse those two things together.

When we give something a clinical name, we do two things at once. We honour it — we say: this is real, you are not imagining it, it deserves attention. And we also, sometimes, locate it as an aberration. A deviation from some baseline of correct functioning that the rest of the world is busy inhabiting while you remain stuck outside it.

But what if the baseline is wrong?

What if the correct functioning we’re being returned to is itself the problem; a pace, a relentlessness, a metric of output that no animal alive would recognise as sustainable?

The salmon does not seek help for its compulsive return. The wolf howling at the edge of its territory is not in crisis. These are creatures living fully inside their nature, doing exactly what their nature asks of them.

And you, lying still in a darkness you don’t fully understand, unable to move, unable to explain what is happening to you — you might be doing the same.

Not broken. Not failing. Not in need of fixing.

Wintering.