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Not Everything Needs Fixing

What we see in others is simply a reflection of ourselves. Sometimes the best fix for someone is to do nothing at all.

Rachael Annabelle
3 min readSep 3, 2020
Photo from Unsplash by Youssef Naddam

At different points in our lives, we cross paths with different characters who bring us laughter, joy, tears, and unique memories who mold us into the person that we are.

Not everyone you meet will be on the same page of their journey as you are, even if you hope for them to. Sometimes we find beauty in some characters, which reflects certain things about ourselves.

And being the self-serving humans we are, we try too hard to make things work in our favor, holding on to a relationship for our selfish reasons. We find it difficult to accept that people come and go — that many relationships are transient.

Often times, we enjoy someone’s company and fall in love with how they make us feel. We find beauty in the little things they do or don’t. When we are attracted to their physical appearance, ambition, humor, kindness, or anything in between, we start to crave more time together with the person.

But at the end of the day, your main consideration is how they make you feel around them.

It’s not about them being ‘different’ from the rest, but how they make you feel different about yourself.

There is, however, a difference between that, and true love, which is also about how we make the other person feel. Love transcends a relational bound where you want to be with someone because of how they make you feel or how the two of you feel when you are together.

Love is also, when you have the confidence and sense of peace, that you are elevating your partner in a healthy way. That you are good for them, but not in a hero-tendency way.

It feels good to know that we are of value, especially when we think we are the fixer of someone else’s trauma — but working harder to fix someone you care for is not a demonstration of love, but rather, codependency.

In the long run, this drains both of you mentally and emotionally, leaving a dysfunctional dynamic. You will be relating to each other from a place of fear, rather than abundance — if you don’t fix them, you’re a bad person. If they reject your help, they are the ones at fault.

More often than not, the other person turns down help because they aren’t in the position to be in love. After all that is said and done, sometimes what the broken need is not love, validation, or comfort, but simply time to build themselves back up before anyone else can.

Not everything needs fixing — and even if they do, perhaps, not immediately.

So control your hero-tendencies to fix things to make you feel better about yourself.

Sometimes, the best fix for someone is to do nothing at all.

Don’t forget, it isn’t always about you.

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Rachael Annabelle
Rachael Annabelle

Written by Rachael Annabelle

knottedbrains.com | googler. founder @gullie.io. photographer. creative consultant. pasta fanatic & occasional nerd.

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