Fixing Justin

Have you ever been around loud machinery for an extended period of time? Imagine a steel mill with the crashing and clanging of equipment; the furnaces roaring. Or a construction site with the rumble of heavy equipment, the buzzing saws, the pounding hammers, and the workers shouting above it all. Then imagine (or remember, if you’ve experienced this) all of the cacophony of sound suddenly going silent. There is an unforgettable line between noise and silence; one so pronounced that it seems like our mind tries to fill the stillness with noise.

Last Tuesday (6/13), this happened to me during therapy. With one question by my therapist Adrienne, 52 years of noise went quiet. “What if you took a break from trying to ‘fix’ yourself?” she asked. Adrienne was not the first to suggest this. My friend Alan said something similar. So did my mom. So did Virginia. But at that moment, I seemed to be ready to hear it.

So I did. I stopped the “fix Justin” machinery and was met with an almost unnerving expanse of inner quiet.

This impulse/drive to fix me goes back to early childhood. I wrote about this in an essay called the “Piece of Shit” doctrine - a doctrine that convinces us that something is wrong with us and that we need to be fixed, redeemed, saved, and/or improved.

Fixing myself had become a combination of job, hobby, and addiction. I was certain that if I stopped fixing myself, I would become complacent, lazy, destructive. I would "go back” to a prior state. And of course, if I stopped fixing myself, then the people I love will hurt me, abandon me, reject me.

“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”

― Erich Fromm