There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was) ™
Real Isn’t an Aesthetic
“There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was),” is a phrase I coined to name the truth of our untouchable wholeness. Recovery (from anything).
Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.
—Edward Said
We are all in exile from our original wholeness — our true essence.
Authenticity is something you can perform, but it’s not something you can fake.
How do you spot the real deal? When you’ve done the work, it’s unmistakable.
It’s not easy—being real. Like the Skin Horse said, “It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Becoming real—becoming ourselves—isn’t easy. It takes being willing to do whatever it takes to get there. It means shedding the layers of expectation, ideology, and shame that have been piled onto us since birth. It means remembering who we were before we were told who to be.
Let’s just say: distressed-look rabbits, like distressed-look jeans, might be trendy,
but they can’t replace the lived experience.
Because real isn’t an aesthetic.
It’s who and what you were before you were told who to be.
The phrase There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was) has been the heart of my work since it came to me over seven years ago, not just a tagline, but a lifeline. Not just a phrase, but an awakening. It struck so deep, I held it close, allowed it to percolate. It became a throughline in my work, a compass in my life, and eventually, the heartbeat of this Substack.
I didn’t come to it lightly. I came to it through fire—through rupture, recovery, and the long process of unlearning everything that taught me otherwise. It wasn’t a clever line I tried on—it was something I remembered in my bones. Something I wrote down to save my own life. It arrived as an epiphany, an awakening, a psychic shift. The veil was pulled back.
The response to my work continues to move me. If you’ve been here since the early days—thank you. You’ve seen it unfold in real time. You’re part of this story too. ⚡️🌈⚡️
It’s been my north star in therapy spaces, in recovery rooms, and in the quiet undercurrents of my creative life.
I'm sharing this to honor the roots of something sacred.
There’s more to TNWWY than at first glance. How can you tell if you really get its meaning? When we truly understand it, we stop behaviors that sabotaged us for years. All my survival behaviors were rooted in the error that I believed there was something wrong with me - something to fix. We don’t need to work on ourselves, improve ourselves, become better -once we comprehend that beneath all that surviving and striving and chasing external fixes there is nothing to fix and there never was.
The only thing that needs correcting is the delusion that something was ever wrong with us to begin with - the illusion - perpetrated by society from all directions - that we had to be shaped or formed into something good - something better or more than human. Something different than who and what we were born to be to begin with. Everything piled onto that is what caused the error - the belief that being human means adding on - when it’s all the adding on that warped us.
If you plant a tree against a barbed wire fence it will grow around the barbed wire; it will incorporate it into its trunk and branches. It will grow because that’s its nature, but it will be warped from its original beauty.
That’s what happened to us.
The truth is that deep within each of us is the original seed of who we were meant to be - to grow into. That seed needs sunlight, soil, nourishment, and mostly, to be left alone. Have you ever tried to make the grass grow faster? Or differently? Have you shamed an aspen tree for its quivering leaves and ash-white bark - for not being oak-like?
Have you told an oak to stop making acorns?
There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was) except someone thought it was their job - like factory farmers - to pump you full of - not antibiotics and hormones like we do our meat -but ideology and doctrine meant to shape you into some idea of human that suits god knows what because this experiment is failing -some idea of who you are supposed to be according to a lethal combination of culture and religion and social engineering and god knows whose idea of couture as well.
We have all these images of who we should be, how we should look, how to act, how to parent, how to be a child, how to be successful, and make money and acquire and win-win what? All of this comes with a carrot dangled that if we just do it right, follow the rules, conform, discover the secret formula - THEN - then we will reach some delusional perfection of a human based on ambitions we never really had to begin with. Then we will be happy.
But the entire thing is rigged - rigged to keep us distracted and pitted against ourselves and each other. Rigged to keep us chasing and busy and productive and anything but ourselves.
Because if we stop. If we go inward - we find that we have passion and purpose and fire and it doesn’t come from anything out there we can ever find. It is our birthright. It is who and what we were made to be just like the tiny acorn was made to be an oak and if we just get the fuck out of the way and let it grow - if we just allow - if we just open and trust life and ourselves - we’ll find an inner guidance system. We’ll find the blueprint we came with. We’ll find our direction and mission. We’ll know who we are. And nothing nothing nothing is better than that.
And it’s important to acknowledge that, on top of believing we need to become something other than ourselves, we learn to hate ourselves.
We internalize a kind of self-loathing and shame based on these messages that tell us who we need to be instead of ourselves. Jesus had a cool message that resonates with mine but unfortunately, his message was hijacked in favor of one of original sin and damnation. This permeates our culture. It is the air we breathe - that we are born bad.
That we cannot be trusted. That we need religion to keep us from committing horrible sins and being the bad flawed people we are purported to be at our root when in reality - it’s the belief that we are flawed, original sinners, shameful, not worthy, not good enough that ironically causes the exact thing we are taught to be so afraid of.
We do act out and behave horribly and hurt ourselves and each other because who wouldn’t when they’ve been put in the double bind of original sin? Who wouldn’t lose their minds having been taught to abhor their natural instincts and built-in intuition? Who wouldn’t make mistakes over and over out of the belief that trusting themselves and their own heart, guts, and soul will result in condemnation - and being found out to be the horrible person we’ve been taught we really are - which is why we need to ignore our body’s wisdom, our heart’s voice, our soul’s guidance.
Yeah — that is enough to drive us to drugs and drinking and gambling and eating disorders and porn addiction and any kind of distraction we can find; because ignoring our body, hearts, and soul is something most outsiders, scapegoats, and addicts just aren’t good at doing — gaslit as we are for hearing the wisdom within louder than most of society. And god help those who are better at learning to ignore their soul’s call.
They will die like T.S. Eliot’s straw men, zombies who’ve never yet lived.
The thing about getting it—truly getting it—is that you can drop the masks, stop performing, and quit all those nasty survivor behaviors you only needed because you believed the lie.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is your invitation. And if not—thank you for reading. That isn’t just something. It’s everything.
No one will be turned away for lack of funds. If you can’t afford a subscription, just let me know—I’ll happily comp you one.
One Thing
Things that may help on the journey back to your s/Self.
Donald Winnicott is best known for his ideas on the true self and false self, the "good enough" parent, and borrowed from his second wife, Clare, arguably his chief professional collaborator, the notion of the transitional object. This video about Winnicott’s work suggests therapy as a safe place for reconnecting with our true essence. I would add that the rooms of 12-Step programs, and the right mentor, is another space that can assist us in this journey, often in conjunction with therapy.
Book: The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller
On Repeat
Shout Outs
This goes out to two writers, Melanie Ess and Steve Edwards, whose writing touches my soul. As Steve wrote in a recent post,
“Write to Writers: Tell the ones who have opened you up, broken you down, stripped you clean. Tell the ones who have applied salve to the blistering burns on your soul. Tell them. Today.”
I’ve been reading
’ incredible work for years and his brilliant essays are not just smart, but poignant, lyric, and deeply human. Check out his Substack The Big Quiet. That’s a good title for what you’ll find with Steve. You’ll find refuge. I do. It’s time I tell him. From If You Want to Write A Poem Try This, Steve writes:If you want to write a poem, the world won’t stop you. The world doesn’t really care what you do. That is the beauty and terror of being here. That’s what makes your choice so meaningful. Out of all your options, you chose this: to speak, to hold still, to gather silence at the edges. ~ Steve Edwards
I followed Steve elsewhere (from whence we all have mostly exited) and I was thrilled to see him join us on Substack.
I discovered Melanie Ess @truthpixie recently through my colleague
who shared an essay by Melanie that blew my socks off. A fellow FSA survivor, Melanie’s essay Shunned is a must read:He never again hit me. He threatened, but no further blows landed…until I realized that words could deliver an equally painful bruise. The day he declared that “I love you” was a provocation, I heard the dungeon door drop a second time. The resounding clang announced, It’s time to give up.
I knew I wasn’t the one trapped behind its metal bars. That was my father, confined to a rigid and inescapable fiction about the eldest daughter who perhaps best loved him—the one who didn’t demand he exile anyone. His cellmates were my sisters, heir to my mother’s lifelong animus. And they did not want to be set free. ~ Melanie Ess
An essayist, college teacher, & mom of a beloved son, Melanie is Working on a memoir about exploring ancestral grief as a way to heal from family scapegoating. I immediately signed up to read more from her. You will, too.
Want to Submit?
I’m looking for 500-word submissions on how to recover (from anything) find your badass, kick ass and align with your true self.
More badass flash on the way from my readers! These special features will be published quarterly if not more frequently—stay tuned! Look for a special edition featuring my fellow 2x2 Cult survivors. And I’d love to hear from FSA Survivors! (Published submissions are not behind a paywall and open to the public.)
📩 Email submissions to: thompsonk@substack.com
There’s no one way to recover—only the way that works for you. Now, go write. 🔥
A Word From my imaginary friend Pepa
How much have you paid to fix what was never broken? What if, instead, you invested in the truth of your wholeness?
Us and money. 🙄
Yeah, not so much. But we’re on a fixed retirement income over here so your support for our writing would be - kick ass! There will never be a paywall cause Kelly’s weird like that. Give it away to keep it, she says. You do your part. I’ll keep looking over her shoulder and inspiring her to get the work out!
When I saw that title, I time-traveled. 1970. I was six. Staring at I’m OK, You’re OK on my mom’s nightstand, wondering if maybe I was the exception. Two years earlier, I watched a Lutheran pastor wave a photo of white Jesus at my sobbing mother and say, “He died for your sins so you don’t have to go to hell.” I learned early that God had to kill someone to tolerate me.
So yeah, this one hit. Your words unhooked the barbed wire that grew into my bark. Virgin Monk Boy would like to report: the soul is still intact, though a little bruised from all the spiritual orthodontics. And that whole “born broken” theology? That’s not salvation. That’s spiritual gaslighting.
Thank you for standing in the ruins and planting wildflowers.
"It’s not the tree that’s wrong—it’s the fence it had to grow around. We carry the shape of what we’ve survived. But our nature was never the problem."
😭 😭 😭
I love you.