I recently learned a phrase that has stayed with me.
Hug the cactus.
It’s commonly used in addiction recovery circles. At first, it sounds ridiculous. Why would anyone willingly hug a cactus? Why choose the thing covered in thorns? But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it isn’t really about the cactus. It’s about what the cactus represents. The discomfort you’ve spent your whole life trying to outrun.
When most people hear the word addiction, they picture drugs or alcohol. But addiction has always fascinated me because I think it’s much bigger than substances. It’s anything we repeatedly use to avoid being alone with ourselves. For some people, that’s alcohol. For others, it’s food. Or shopping. Or work. Or achievement. Or relationships. Or social media. Or exercise. Or constantly reinventing themselves.
The object changes; the escape stays the same.
And as someone who has always had an addictive personality, I’ve started wondering if I’ve simply chosen socially acceptable addictions.
People often say,
“Just learn how to sit with yourself.”
As if it’s that simple.
I don’t think they understand how hard that actually is. Because sitting with yourself isn’t just sitting. It’s sitting without reaching for relief. Without checking your phone. Without creating a new goal. Without deciding to repaint the room. Without buying something. Without planning the next chapter before you’ve finished living this one. It’s sitting in a silence that almost feels loud. And if your nervous system has learned that movement equals safety, stillness can feel like danger.
I’ve started noticing something about myself.
I work with a teenage boy. Every time he comes over, he says the same thing.
“Your house always looks different when I come here.”
He’s right. I’m always rearranging something. The couch. The bookshelf. The plants. The artwork.
At first, I laughed. But then I asked myself a difficult question.
Am I rearranging my home because I genuinely love creating beautiful spaces? Or am I trying to change something outside of me because I can’t tolerate something inside of me remaining the same?
That question has followed me everywhere. Because maybe it isn’t about furniture. Maybe it’s about me.
Looking back, I’ve realized I don’t only rearrange my home. I’ve rearranged my life. I’ve become exceptional at jobs, then left. I’ve mastered things, then searched for the next mountain. I dreamed of becoming a running coach before I could even run two kilometres. Eventually I ran a marathon. I started a run club, then one day, running quietly disappeared from my life. Not because I stopped loving it, but because I had already become the version of myself I once dreamed of.
It makes me wonder. Was I chasing the thing? Or was I chasing the becoming of the thing?
For years, I’ve taught the same philosophy.
Keep growing. Keep rising. Become someone who can then help others rise too.
I believe wisdom is meant to become love. Knowledge is meant to become connection. Healing is meant to ripple into community.
I still believe that.
Every class I taught, I reminded people:
“Everything you do and everything you are creates a ripple effect.”
I meant it. I still do. But after burning out this year, I found myself asking a painful question.
Was I teaching something that wasn’t true? Was I unknowingly building my own cage? Was I manifesting my burnout by believing that I always had to rise?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized, the philosophy wasn’t wrong; it was incomplete.
Because nature doesn’t rise forever. A tree doesn’t spend all year growing. It grows. It flowers. It bears fruit. Then it sheds. Then it rests.
If it tried to bloom in every season, it would die.
Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve created a version of personal growth where perpetual expansion is considered healthy. Always healing. Always optimizing. Always becoming. Always improving. Always rising. We celebrate spring. We romanticize summer. But we resist winter with everything we have.
As if rest were failure instead of biology.
Maybe that’s why burnout hurts so much. Not because our bodies stop. But because our identities don’t know how to.
When I left my job, I didn’t just lose work. I lost momentum. I lost the version of myself that was constantly becoming. Without the next milestone, who was I?
I think that’s the real cactus. Not pain. Not grief. Not failure, but stillness. The terrifying possibility that if we stop moving, we’ll finally notice the thorns we’ve been pressing into all along.
Recovery, in any form, asks something extraordinary of us.
Not to become stronger overnight. Not to stop craving. Not to force ourselves into discipline.
It asks us to stay; long enough to notice that urges behave like waves.
They rise. They peak. They fall.
And every time we stay instead of escaping, we gather evidence. Not that life is easier, but that we are capable. And evidence creates confidence.
I wonder how many of us spend our lives mistaking movement for growth.
Changing cities. Changing careers. Changing partners. Changing furniture. Changing identities.
Convincing ourselves that because things are changing, we must be evolving.
Sometimes we are, but sometimes we’re just running beautifully.
Lately, I’ve noticed something changing in my own language.
For years, everything I spoke about was vertical.
Rise. Grow. Become. Climb. Higher. Next.
But recently, different words have appeared.
Root. Home. Stay. Settle. Being. Ground.
At first, I thought these two philosophies contradicted each other.
Now I think they complete each other.
Roots don’t stop a tree from reaching the sky; they simply make sure it doesn’t have to keep proving that it can.
Maybe that’s what “hug the cactus” really means.
Not to love pain. Not to glorify suffering. Not to force yourself to endure. But to stop abandoning yourself every time life becomes uncomfortable. To sit in the boredom. To survive the silence. To trust that not every season is meant to bloom. Because there is another kind of growth that nobody applauds.
The kind happening underground. The kind that looks like nothing from the outside. The kind that teaches you how to remain. And perhaps remaining has always been the lesson I was avoiding.
I spent years believing the purpose of life was to keep rising.
Now I wonder if it’s something gentler.
Maybe we rise so that one day we can stop fearing the ground beneath our feet.
Maybe wisdom isn’t found in how many mountains we climb, yet maybe it’s found in discovering that home was never at the summit.
It was in learning how to stay.
So the next time life hands me a cactus, I hope I remember this.
Not every thorn is asking me to fight.
Some are simply asking me to remain long enough to discover that I can.