Nobody is coming to save you

On finding what actually works for you, and owning the authority over your life.

I want to share with you one of the most painful, freeing, and empowering concepts that I learned, and I want to say it plainly, because softening it would rob it of that power.

Nobody is coming to save you.

I know how that can sound. It feels cold and distant on the page. But this is the exact realization that propelled me forward, fueled my charge to feel better, pushed me outside of my comfort zone so that I could find what worked best for me. This realization allowed me to step back into my life. For a long time I was waiting to be rescued in a sense. I was waiting for the right doctor, the right family member, the right medication, the right expert who would finally hand me the answer and lift me out. I gave my authority, my innate power, away to every one of them, one at a time. And each time, when the rescue did not land, I sank a little further, because I had bet my recovery on someone outside of myself. This was all done subconsciously, whether it was internal programming from childhood or society telling us how things should be done. It really doesn’t matter. The point is, giving away your power and waiting for the external influence won’t do it. There is a more effective way through it all, and it will require your active involvement.

When we place our authority outside of ourselves, we quietly let go of the wheel. We hand over the controls of our own life, and then we cannot understand why we no longer seem able to steer. This is not to say the people around you cannot help you. They can, enormously, and that fact rates so highly that I’m devoting the next blog piece to it. I’m simply saying they cannot drive for you. No one else can sit in your seat.

You’ve read some of my story. (If you missed it, it is here.) Going into the partial hospitalization program, I did not believe an SSRI was the right path for me. I had my own history with them and my own internal convictions and knowing. However, I desperately wanted to get better and this was a requirement for the program facilitators. In a sense I was trapped, forced into it. I was moved to the highest dose within a week. For me, the results were mostly harmful.

I want to be fair and honor myself here too. Choosing that program in the first place, and staying through the parts that were hard, was still me listening to something deep within that knew I needed more support than I could find on my own. The program had more than a medication element, and so I compromised because something told me the other layers were going to be effective. They had to be. The mind-body components offered were rudimentary at best, but they were a jumping off point, and I will be forever grateful.

I am not telling you about the medication layer to frighten you off of any sort of medication, and I am not suggesting what the right path is for you as an individual. Medication can offer real relief for many people, and there are always side effects, whether emotional or physical, which should not be a surprise since they are written right on the bottle. That being said, my own journey did include a much older and well studied medication that genuinely helped me. When prescribed at a very low dose, this medication can assist with sleep; too high a dose, and it does the opposite. Getting my sleep back was part of what allowed me to heal. I found value in it and respected it for the job it was doing within my system. I knew it was an impermanent stepping stone to the next phase of my evolution. That is the whole distinction. It was never about the medication. It was about who was doing the choosing.

Over time, in that quiet hospital room, with my hand on my heart, something in me shifted before anyone confirmed it. I felt my own state change under my own attention. Initially I wasn’t even aware of the shift. It was subtle yet life changing. And when a therapist let slip that I had “beaten the medication,” meaning my relief had arrived before the medication started to take effect, she was not giving me news. She was confirming something I had already felt from the inside. None of this came from an expert handing it to me. It came from me, feeling the truth in my own body. That is the day I stopped waiting to be saved.

I continue to be crushed whenever I hear the phrase “I’ll give it up to…” You fill in the blank, as there are many variations and iterations. It tells me that a person is not an active participant in their own life. Not yet, anyway. I was and am my own healer. I am the artist responsible for this beautiful life. Not the passenger, waiting to be taken somewhere better. Not the patient or victim, waiting to be fixed. The one with her hands on the wheel.

So let me say what needs to be acknowledged underneath all of this. You are your own best medicine. Not because help does not matter. It truly and emphatically does. We all need community and resources. Help is something you receive, not something that does the work for you. A doctor can prescribe. A guide can hold the room. A book can point or offer a new perspective. A medication can steady the ground under your feet. None of them can place your attention for you. None of them can feel your own experience for you. None of them can do the small daily work of laying down a new neural pathway, making a behavioral change, or a shift within your own nervous system. Only you are there for all of it. You are the only constant. It asks for your active participation, every single day, and there is no version of this where it does not.

This is what I mean when I talk about sovereignty. It is not a slogan, and it is not “toughness.” It is the plain fact that the authority over your inner life belongs to you, and it cannot be given away for long without a cost. You can take in a doctor’s guidance and still stay the author of your care. You can love and respect a teacher and still check what they say against your own experience. You can receive an enormous amount of help and still know, underneath it, that the decisions and actions are yours to take.

The moment you stop waiting to be rescued, you are not more alone. You are more free, more powerful in the way you hold yourself, more confident within your own innate healing abilities. All the energy you were spending scanning the horizon for a savior or magic button comes home to you. You finally have space to focus on the one thing that is always going to move the needle, which is your own patient yet diligent participation.

So this week, if you want a place to begin, notice one spot where you have handed your authority away. One decision you have outsourced entirely, one place where you are waiting for permission or for rescue. You do not have to storm off and fire everyone. You just have to take one small piece of it back. Ask yourself the question you may have stopped asking. “What does my own experience tell me here?” Then trust that you are allowed to listen to the answer.

Nobody is coming to save you. And the day that phrase stops feeling frightening and starts feeling empowering is the day everything begins to change. You are worth it.

Big Love,

Thomasina