There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from carrying things you were never meant to hold forever. Versions of yourself you’ve outgrown. Relationships that ended badly. Mistakes you can still describe in painful detail, years later. I know this because I spent most of my twenties doing exactly that, shifting emotional weight I couldn’t put down, wondering why I felt so heavy.
Now I’m 37. I’ve built something I’m proud of, found love, created a life that matters. By most accounts, life is good. And yet the lessons that feel most true to me aren’t the ones about success or strategy. They’re the quieter, harder ones. The ones nobody really talks about until they’re ready.
So here’s what I’ve actually learned the hard way.
Self-worth takes longer to build than you think, and it can’t come from outside you
Before I started Hack Spirit, before any of the writing took off, I spent time doing jobs that gave me no sense of identity or purpose. I had zero sense of self-worth. Not the performative, social-media version of self-worth. Real self-worth. The kind that doesn’t require a title, a salary, or someone else telling you you’re doing okay.
I spent years trying to borrow it from the wrong places. From achievements. From other people’s approval. From the idea that if I could just get to the next thing, I’d finally feel like I was worth something. It didn’t work, because it never works. Research published in PMC found that authentic self-worth, the kind not dependent on comparison or external standards, is what actually predicts psychological wellbeing over time. The fragile version, the kind built on achievements and other people’s opinions, shatters under any real pressure.
What eventually helped me wasn’t a mindset hack. It was small, patient work. Early morning runs around my neighbourhood. Learning new things badly, getting corrected constantly, and continuing anyway. Writing things down. Sitting with discomfort instead of running from it. These weren’t grand gestures. They were tiny, repeated acts of showing up for myself, and slowly, something shifted.
The Buddhist concept of non-attachment is useful here, not as a way of not caring about things, but as a way of not tying your identity to outcomes you can’t control. Your worth isn’t something you earn. It was already there. The work is just clearing away everything that convinced you otherwise.
Healing isn’t linear, and expecting it to be only makes it worse
We have a cultural obsession with healing as a clean upward trajectory. You go through something hard, you work through it, and then you emerge on the other side, healed. Done. Moving on.
That’s not how it actually works, and the gap between that expectation and reality is where a lot of unnecessary suffering lives.
Modern grief research shows that healing moves in waves, not in a straight line. You revisit emotions you thought were settled. You feel fine for a week and then something ordinary, a song, a smell, a quiet Saturday morning, pulls you back into something you thought you’d left behind. This is not a setback. This is what healing actually looks like.
Psychologists describe it as oscillation, moving between pain and reengagement with life, back and forth, over and over. Not failing. Processing. There’s a meaningful difference between those two things, even if it doesn’t feel that way at 2am when you’re right in the middle of it.
I had to learn this personally. After starting Hack Spirit, I thought I’d done enough inner work to leave my anxiety behind. I hadn’t. The anxiety followed me, just wearing different clothes. I’d have whole months where I felt steady and clear, and then weeks where my nervous system was completely wired again. It took time, and a lot of patience I didn’t naturally have, to understand that I wasn’t regressing. I was spiraling upward, even when it felt like I was going in circles.
Letting go is painful because it’s real loss, not weakness
There’s a romanticized version of letting go that looks like serenity. You release what no longer serves you and feel lighter immediately. In my experience, it’s far messier than that.
Letting go of an identity you’ve held for years feels like grief. Letting go of a relationship, even a dysfunctional one, involves mourning the version of the future you thought you’d have. Letting go of an old story about who you are, even a damaging one, can feel destabilizing, because at least you knew that story. The new one is unfamiliar terrain.
A study published in the journal Behavioral Sciences found that the inability to let go is a distinct psychological factor, separate from simple rumination, and that it significantly predicts anxiety, dysphoria, and reduced wellbeing. Letting go isn’t just a spiritual idea. It’s a measurable psychological skill, and it takes active, ongoing practice, especially in the beginning when everything in you wants to hold on.
What helps is not forcing it. You can’t will yourself to let go of something by sheer effort of mind. What you can do is stop feeding it. Stop rehearsing the old story. Stop reopening the wound to check if it’s still there. Harvard Health notes that rumination, the mental habit of replaying painful scenarios, actively worsens anxiety, depression, and the body’s stress responses. The brain doesn’t distinguish between a memory and a present experience in the way we’d like it to. Every time you replay something, you’re putting yourself through it again.
The alternative isn’t pretending it didn’t happen. It’s acknowledging it, feeling it fully, and then choosing, repeatedly, not to live there. That choice gets easier with practice. But it doesn’t start easy.
The common thread: self-compassion as the foundation
If I had to point to one thing that quietly underlies all three of these lessons, it’s self-compassion. Not self-pity, not self-indulgence. The real thing. Treating yourself with the same basic kindness you’d extend to someone you actually care about.
Research published in World Psychiatry describes self-compassion as comprising three core elements: kindness toward yourself when you’re suffering, recognising that struggle is part of the shared human experience, and holding your pain in awareness without being consumed by it. When all three are present, something genuinely changes.
What I’ve noticed in my own life is that self-compassion didn’t make me softer in the ways I feared. It made me more willing to be honest. More willing to try things and fail. More willing to acknowledge when I’m struggling instead of performing okayness. And paradoxically, it made the work of healing and letting go feel less like a battle and more like something I was doing with myself, not against myself.
NIH-published research by Dr. Kristin Neff found that higher self-compassion is linked to decreased anxiety, depression, and rumination, alongside increased optimism and connectedness. It also noted that self-compassionate people show greater personal initiative to make needed changes, not less, which surprises most people who assume that being kind to yourself means letting yourself off the hook.
You’re not letting yourself off the hook. You’re building a foundation stable enough to actually do the work.
I’m 37 and still learning all of this. My daughter is less than a year old, and already she’s teaching me things about patience and presence that no book ever managed to. My wife is teaching me things about perseverance and grace that I’m only beginning to understand. And I’m writing about it because I believe the hardest lessons, the ones about self-worth and healing and letting go, are the ones most worth sharing. Not because I’ve mastered them. But because I’m in it, and maybe you are too.
