What’s Wrong With You?

Short answer: nothing.

There’s a quiet lie that does more damage than the loud ones because it doesn’t shout. It just sits down next to you at the end of a long day and says: everyone else has this figured out. What’s wrong with you?

I saw it on display the other day in our morning circle. As one of our volunteers was telling her story, I heard that old lie echoing in my own mind. I saw myself there. Old me. Sometimes still me.

She’d been trying to do the right thing — caring for the land, the people, the whole tangled mess — and she was tired of doing the math and always coming out on the losing end. “The folks who don’t bother,” she said, “seem to have it so much easier.” And underneath that: am I the only one who cares? And under that one, quieter still: everyone else got the instruction manual. What’s wrong with me that none of that works for me?

I know that voice. I still wrestle with it from time to time. It’s a tricky bugger.

Here’s the thing about that lie — it’s not stupid, and it’s not an accident.

There’s a whole industry, well-lit and well-funded, built on holding the monopoly on The Beautiful Theory That Fixes Everything, dispensed from sages on a stage with no skin in the game. Meanwhile the ones actually doing the work — feeding the animals, mediating the conflict, sitting up with the burned-out friend — are the ones finding out in real time exactly where the theory runs out of road. And when they say so, it gets treated as noise. Anecdote. Doesn’t count. As if lived experience were the thing getting in the way of the Truth, instead of the only place truth has ever actually shown up.

I’ve come to think that’s not just intellectually lazy — it’s the same move that keeps people small everywhere. Convince someone their own read on what’s real can’t be trusted, and you don’t have to argue with them anymore. You’ve already won. You control “the real world” and everyone else is subject to it.

So here’s a question I’ve been sitting with instead of an Answer, because I’m growing suspicious of anyone handing out Answers to these confusing times: what if the whole thing isn’t a problem waiting to be fixed, but an invitation into the process of creation?

Gabor Maté points out that our culture has quietly set belonging and integrity against each other — “Pick one,” it says, “you don’t get both.” Go along, and you belong. Choose integrity and it’s going to cost you.

Then, as a backup in case anyone dares to still choose integrity, the culture convinces us that integrity actually means living up to somebody else’s idea of how you ought to behave. The ideal “human.” Perfect in every way.

But of course integrity implies integration. Making peace with the whole of your actual experience, instead of performing the parts that are socially acceptable while attempting to amputate the parts that don’t fit other people’s expectations.

But it was never pick one. What if instead of trying to make an impossible choice, we asked ourselves what would it take to build a culture where belonging depended on integrity, instead of costing you yours?

That’s not an action plan. It’s an attitude. Roland just posted a meme: “resilience is like jazz improv,” and we’ve had a saying around here longer than either of us can remember that goes: “it’s not the what, it’s the how.” The way you relate to the hard thing turns out to be the same muscle as the way you relate to life generally. Either you treat life as a problem to solve or as an invitation into curiosity, connection, and playfulness. Same challenge; different stance.

I should be honest about a limit here, or I’m just trading one “beautiful theory” for another. The felt sense of this — belonging built on integrity instead of despite it — doesn’t really translate easily into words. It has to be experienced. Showing up warts and all and being accepted not in spite of but because of those warts. The words are useful after that, as a way of pointing back at something you already know in your body. Before that, tho, more words just take you further from it, not closer to it. I don’t have a clean way around this. Some of you will hear this and nod along as it resonates with something real for you. For others, I’m sure I sound like a fool. Take what’s useful.

So, what’s the “so what”? How do all of us doing the work slay the “what’s wrong with you” demon? How do we build spaces where integrity and integration aren’t a barrier to belonging, but a prerequisite?

My honest answer is unglamorous. You can’t argue anyone into integrity. You can only build more places and more moments where it’s likely to happen, or where people feel brave enough to reconnect with the version of it they already had and talked themselves out of trusting. And then, for the ones who’ve had a taste and want more, we build ways for them to find each other and keep growing it. That, as near as I can tell, is most of what we’re actually doing out here at the Farmastery. Turns out the mission statement has more to do with a story about turning self-doubt inside-out in circle than saving the world or finding enlightenment.

As for the volunteer, I just said “me too.” Old me battled that demon all the time. And sometimes I still do. More than I’d like. But much less often, and now I know the secret. He’s no problem. Never was.

That seemed like enough for one morning.