Your Plans Can’t Depend on Me Without Involving Me
I enjoy ruining the plans others have for me.
Now before you start calling me all kinds of selfish and narcissistic, strap in for a little context.
I was conditioned to be a people pleaser. The burden of regulating everyone else’s emotions was dumped on me from a young age. I was the scapegoat - the designated “problem,” “rebellious one,” “overly sensitive one,” “too much one,” or “never enough one.” At the same time I was expected to serve as the peacemaker and pillar of stability and predictability. The environment I was raised in thrived on dismissive-avoidant behavior so it was never safe to directly address my discomfort with bearing the burdens that everyone else was content to pretend didn’t exist.
It’s not difficult to understand how one could develop deep - and often unconscious - people pleasing tendencies in this kind of environment. Couple that with being undiagnosed autistic and ADHD…yeah ‘twas rough for your girl.
For the first 3+ decades of my life I was thoroughly convinced that I genuinely liked helping people above all else. Don’t get me wrong - I do absolutely love giving back and wouldn’t describe myself as selfish; however, I couldn’t even think about saying no to someone unless it was an absolute logistical impossibility for me to acquiesce to their request. The amount of guilt that would arise was enough to keep me overextending myself and calling it a virtue.
That’s why now as a recovering people pleaser and self abandoner I take pride in being able to ruin the plans others make that rely on my availability without ever giving me the opportunity to decide my level of involvement, if any, for myself. It’s not about being purposefully difficult - it’s about setting boundaries, not over explaining yourself, and being proud of your growth. It’s appreciating your ability to alchemize the energy being projected onto you by people that rely on you but never consider you.
Getting here took a lot of inner alchemy. Alchemy - in the spiritual context - is the process of transmuting energy into fuel to power your personal growth and journey to return to your authentic self. Rooted in the alchemical aim of transmuting a base metal like lead into pure gold, inner alchemy focuses on elevating whatever is thrown your way - be it positive or negative - and using it for your betterment. It’s not about fixing what is broken - it’s about recognizing what never was…and finally choosing to live and thrive from that place of truth.
It’s natural to categorize situations that happen to us as either positive or negative. We use those categorizations as a tool to determine what we should and shouldn’t do in response to them. Often we internalize both the negative and the positive to surprisingly similar effects. Depending wholly on either is what keeps us from understanding our essential role in how we move forward in the face of people, places and circumstances outside of ourselves.
If you internalize the positive things it can build an over reliance on external factors to reassure you. It doesn’t allow you to develop a connection with your higher self (aka your inner witness). This leads to performing for validation instead of existing in authenticity. Your identity is shaped by how others view you rather than being self determined. Any changes in the amount of positive reinforcement causes changes in how you value yourself.
Similarly, internalizing the negative things feeds shame, guilt and fear. It doesn’t nurture self-love, compassion and self-acceptance. This too supports an identity that is shaped by the opinions of others and doesn’t tap into the unique signature of your soul that only you can bring to life. You will spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort contorting yourself and trying fruitlessly to fit into a mold that was never intended to support authentic, fulfilling growth.
What inner alchemy teaches us is that we don’t have to completely separate from the world. If that were the case, then what would be the purpose of having a human experience? No, instead it encourages us to look at situations outside of us from a new perspective. Instead of asking “why is this happening” or “what does this say about me”, we shift to “what can I learn from this situation?” We move from being passive participants and victims of circumstance to active directors of our lives. You go from being influenced to being influential.
I started on this journey long before I even understood what inner alchemy is. That’s because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to practice the art of alchemy. Part of my work with The Inner Alchemy Project is to help reframe our understanding of the constructs we all operate under (i.e. societal norms) and help people to figure out how this reframing applies to them.
That’s no shade to those that teach courses and create guides with specific rituals and suggestions - there’s certainly an audience with a genuine need for that kind of help. However, my approach will resonate with people who may need a prompt or a jumping off point but take pleasure in traversing the bulk of the journey on their own. The solo warriors - the ones that have spent far too long with everyone else’s voices in their heads and are finally willing to dive deep, tune out the noise and tune into their authentic frequency.
The Inner Alchemy Project is a multi-part exploration of what it actually takes to unlearn survival, dismantle inherited narratives, and reclaim the self beyond shame, conditioning, and respectability politics. At its core, this project is about rupture and remembrance where the community we build is here for support and guidance only when you need it. If you are ready to co-create a space that encourages individual growth within the comfort and support of like-minded community, The Inner Alchemy Project is for you.
