You Cannot Save Everyone, Nor Are You Meant To

The truth about wounded healers is that the person they most want to save is really just themselves.

The truth about every healer is that they were, at one point, wounded in a way they deemed irreparable, and so their lives were built around trying to compensate for that loss.

This, of course, can be a gift.

This can be the deciding factor that makes your life path worthwhile, that transforms your sorrows into triumphs, that takes the worst of what happened to you and makes it the onus on which you build a meaningful, purposeful life.

There is nothing wrong with being a wounded healer. There is nothing wrong with wanting to save others. This is a really beautiful thing.

But it starts to work against you when you want to save everyone, because the hard truth is that you cannot save anyone. No, not even that person. The only person you can save is yourself.

You can inspire others, you can help them. You can give them wisdom, knowledge and guidance. But they must walk themselves up the mountain. Nobody can do it for them. In life, we come alone, and we leave alone. What few people realize is that in between, we may walk alongside those we love, but our paths are ultimately just for us.

And that is okay, because really, we don’t even want to save everyone. That’s just what we believe on the surface.

The truth is that healers don’t want to save because they are martyrs. They want to save because they see themselves in the broken. They want to save because it is uncomfortable to witness a suffering so much like their own. They want to save because they are convinced another person’s outcomes will impact their life in some way, literal or not. They want to save because, in the end, their desire is to save themselves.

The problem is not that you want to save everyone and cannot.

The problem is that you need to save yourself and you fear you will not.

Eventually you will realize that your life is of your own making, and you must give someone power over you to have power over you. You control your life, you control your outcomes. You control your space, your safety. For everything that is out of your control, your immediate circle — the space in which you live and exist — is within your jurisdiction.

It only becomes jeopardized when you decide that you are more comfortable breaking down your own boundaries than having to witness someone go through the exact type of pain that still, in small ways, exists within you.

This is not because you are selfish.

This is not because you are wrong.

It is because you have worked so hard for your freedom, you are hypersensitive to anything that could threaten it.

So don’t let it.

Hold tight to your principles, your boundaries, your limits.

When you tell others: only you can save your life.

Remember to remind yourself, as well.