The Year I Quit Trying to Fix Myself

Last summer, I nearly died trying to heal myself. This summer, I quit trying to fix what was never broken

The intense heat wave landed this week and my body remembered. A year ago, it wasn’t a few days, it was three straight months. Ninety-eight degrees inside my house with zero air conditioning. It stayed that way for three months.

Last summer I was eating every meal outside because it was cooler than my house. The air conditioning unit exploded in May. I was sitting in my office making notes from a zoom call I had just finished - that always generates heat anyway and noticed things were just not cooling down. At all. And I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I knew exactly what happened. The central A/C had conked. Sitting there right then I started making calls for service - some said don’t worry - might only be the capacitor. Easy fix. But onsite - it was a different story. It had died a final death - and the system took an old refrigerant no longer in use. No way to resurrect it. It needed replaced. Great. Just great.

My house was 98 degrees inside. For three months.

I switched up my offerings to have more remote services - to mitigate the oppressive heat. I moved my “office” to the basement and did oracle card readings using my own Soultography deck, something I love to do, so they became very popular. The basement was the only place that stayed below 90. Still, with all the energy I generated, there I was dripping in sweat narrating spreads relationships, running energy and holding space while I was melting. It had become a version of serene healing sanctuary and escape hatch from the hell's kitchen all in one.

My Soultography deck - made from my own photography. They got me through last year’s “basement office.”

The money situation was brutal. Oracle readings were great but lackluster on funds needed. As it was, my healing practice was bringing in maybe grocery money. I'm watching my savings disappear while sitting in what felt like Satan's oven.

Mornings I'd shut the house up tighter than a drum and head to the basement - to eat, to work. Watering started before that, about 6 AM to beat the heat. By 8 AM, forget it. Evenings, I'd drag dinner outside, waiting for the sun to drop enough that I could breathe without feeling like I was inhaling soup.

The rest of the time? I lived in my pool. Small dips to get wet, throw on a coverup and back to the basement. Untiil I would get hot again and then it would be the same thing over - and over. As long as I stayed semi-wet, things seemingly could be tolerated. Barely.

But the really twisted part of all this - besides the fact I was dealing with the obvious problems - no air conditioning, where’s the money? I went looking for what was wrong with ME.

I was a metaphysical energy healing practitioner and what I knew or thought I knew - was that there was something underneath this hellish situation that had “caused it.” Being part of healing communities for years reinforced that notion - where the message was always the same: something inside you is broken and needs fixing. Your nervous system, your trauma, your karma, a past life, your ancestral whatever. Always another layer to clear, another modality needed, another thing wrong with you to discover.

So there I was, sweating my ass off, doubling down on shadow work and karmic clearing. Spending hours in that basement oven, digging into my psyche, asking what I'd done to create this hell. What spiritual lesson was I missing?

The universe didn't care about my inner work. It stayed hot. Day after day.

At some point, I felt my soul trying to check out. I could literally feel my life force saying "I'm done." Years of over-healing, over-analyzing, over-everything had already fried my nervous system. This was just the final straw.

Finally, things cooled down in September. A/C got restored after some hard hard choices and my head started to clear a tiny bit.

I was sitting at my desk one day, first time in months it was tolerable in my real office. I'd just gotten off a call with another practitioner who was describing my profile with a different kind of astrology method - sidereal. And it hit me like a lightning bolt.

Holy shit. You're obsessed with finding what's wrong with you. You're doing nothing but looking for problems to heal. This is the ultimate form of self-punishment in the flesh.

Then the bigger picture smacked me. Holy shit, that's what these communities are! They exist because there's always something wrong, something to fix. It got even deeper - it really hit me between the eyes when I realized it was the exact same thing I walked away from decades and decades ago with religion. And here I was, caught up in it again.

I sat there staring at my computer, processing this all and watching it stream in like golden threads of insight, realizing I'd turned healing into self-destruction. I was literally conditioned to find problems with myself.

What if there was nothing “wrong” with me to begin with?

This summer I have air conditioning. Central air that works and runs. Same brutal heat outside, but I walk into my cool house and my whole body exhales.

There's this internal quiet I'd forgotten existed.

Yesterday morning I spent an hour in my garden, deadheading the petunias and marigolds. Just milling around. Not analyzing anything - only deadheading flowers. The bees were working the lavender. Light hitting the water droplets on the leaves. It was enough - just the way it was.

Love shows up everywhere now. Those bees. My neighbor who waves every morning. The way my fresh lemon balm tea tastes. The sunflowers reaching for the sun, the marigolds, the cucumbers vining up the trellis. The marigolds that volunteer themselves in places I never planted them.

I'm done scanning. Done making everything a spiritual lesson. Done looking for what's wrong, what needs clearing, what wants healing. There's this quiet space in my head that used to be filled with constant self-analysis. Now it's just quiet.

When I go outside now, it's because I want to. To feel the sun, to watch what's blooming, to see if the cucumber beetles found my plants yet. When I come back inside, it's just moving from one pleasant space to another.

I spent this year quitting everything. The detox protocols I was obsessed with, the supplements that went with them. The healing groups that always found something more that needs healed. The analyzing every problem for deeper meaning.

Money's still tight. Some days still suck. I deal with what's in front of me without making it cosmic. The reflex to scan my psyche for what created it is gone. I’m not obsessed with looking for a lesson in everyday inconveniences.

Joy shows up without me working for it. I notice beautiful things again. I laugh at random stuff. There's a peace that runs underneath everything now. I stopped digging holes in myself long enough to notice it was already there.

Last summer I nearly died trying to heal myself. This summer I have air conditioning, quiet in my head, and I quit trying to fix what was never broken.

God, what a difference a year makes.

Love,
Sherry

To those who read, share, comment, or support this work - thank you. Your presence creates a field where these words can exist. If something here resonated, feel free to pass it along. Recognition travels through authentic connections.

If you'd like to buy me a coffee, I'll pull you a card from my Soultography deck - the same one I used during those sweltering basement readings. Just include your name and I'll send you what comes through.

It's a small way to say thank you for keeping this work alive.

☕ Buy Me A Coffee
Grateful for your support.

About the Author

Sherry writes from the other side of trying to fix herself. With almost 7 decades of living, she's done with the endless optimization project that passes for spiritual growth these days. After decades in spiritual and healing communities, she walked away from the endless optimization project and discovered what life feels like when you're not constantly working on it.

She refuses to disappear into society's expectations of what older women should be. Instead, she writes about what actually happens - the absurdities, the beauty, the ordinary moments that don't need to mean anything profound.

Her blog, It Exists (For Now), documents life from the other side of trying to fix yourself. She lives in Pennsylvania. She grows things. She has air conditioning. Some days suck. She's done making that cosmic.

This is the voice that showed up when she stopped performing all the others.