Being Regulated Is the Truest Form of Freedom

Medicine in the Margins // No. 1

Being Regulated Is the Truest Form of Freedom

And it probably doesn't look the way you think.

There is a version of me that can still walk into a room and mistake vigilance for wisdom.

She scans faces.

Reads tone.

Anticipates outcomes before anyone has spoken.

She calls it being prepared.

Sometimes she even calls it intuition.

But if I'm honest...

she's afraid.

I know her well because I have been her. But I am no longer her. She exists in memory, and yet still I feel her.

Maybe you have felt this contradiction too.

We spend years believing we are becoming ourselves while quietly becoming adaptations to everything we've survived.

We call it personality.

"I'm just independent."

"I don't trust easily."

"I'm always the strong one."

"I'm a fixer."

"I'm anxious."

"I'm driven."

Maybe.

Or maybe those are simply the names we've given the armor after wearing it long enough.

Here's the thing about armor.

If you wear it every day, eventually it stops feeling like something you're wearing.

It starts feeling like skin.

The body is brilliant like that.

It doesn't ask whether a strategy makes you happy.

It asks one question.

Did this keep us alive?

If the answer is yes...

it remembers.

And it keeps remembering long after the danger has packed its bags and gone home.

I don't say this from a mountaintop.

I say it as someone who has had to meet herself beneath the armor more than once.

Not because I wanted to.

Because life eventually stopped accepting my disguises. And in turn, so did I.

The beautiful thing about the nervous system is that it isn't interested in becoming a better version of you.

It isn't trying to make you more productive.

More spiritual.

More impressive.

It has only ever been trying to get you home alive.

That realization changed the way I looked at myself.

I stopped asking,

"What's wrong with me?"

And started asking,

"What has my body been trying so faithfully to protect?"

Those are very different questions.

One breeds shame.

The other breeds curiosity.

Curiosity is where rehabilitation begins.

Not fixing.

Not forcing.

Not another twelve-step morning routine that promises to optimize your humanity before breakfast.

God, we're obsessed with optimization.

Even healing has become something to perform.

We've somehow managed to turn the sacred work of becoming more ourselves into another competitive sport.

Who meditates longer.

Who cold plunges colder.

Who breathes better.

Who never gets triggered.

Nature has to be laughing.

A forest doesn't wake up trying to become a better forest.

The ocean doesn't apologize for having tides.

A hawk doesn't enroll in a masterclass on confidence.

Only humans have become so disconnected from their own nature that we've convinced ourselves authenticity is another skill to acquire.

The wild doesn't need improving.

It needs remembering.

This is why I believe being regulated is the truest form of freedom.

Not because regulated people are calm.

I've met plenty of calm people who were terrified.

Not because regulated people never get activated.

Life would have to stop being life for that to happen.

Being regulated means something far more rebellious.

It means yesterday no longer gets to hijack today.

It means fear is allowed a voice but not the steering wheel.

It means grief can sit beside you without convincing you the world has ended.

It means anger becomes information instead of identity.

It means joy no longer feels suspicious.

It means your body slowly realizes it can unclench.

That it no longer has to mistake every unfamiliar moment for danger.

That's freedom.

Not because life stopped asking difficult things of you.

Because you stopped abandoning yourself every time it did.

There are still days I catch myself reaching for old armor.

Days when vigilance masquerades as wisdom.

Days when old stories knock on the door.

The difference now is that I recognize them.

I don't mistake them for me anymore.

I know the way home.

And perhaps that's all regulation really is.

Not becoming someone who never leaves themselves.

But becoming someone who knows how to return.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Nature has never demanded perfection from us.

Only participation.

Every tide returns.

Every season circles back.

Every migration remembers its way.

Perhaps we do too.

Perhaps beneath every adaptation...

beneath every wound...

beneath every identity we've built to survive...

there remains something quietly, stubbornly wild.

Not waiting to be invented.

Waiting to be remembered.

Ashe,

Your Wahine of the Sun