The Silver Lining of Dysfunction
Discomfort can create positive change ✨
Hi folks! Today, I want to talk about something that has been on my heart for a while: the silver lining of growing up in a dysfunctional family.
Now, before anyone comes for me, I am not saying that dysfunction is a gift or that anyone should be grateful for the pain they experienced. What I am saying is that, after years of therapy, somatic work, and deep spiritual healing, I can finally look back on my own life and see how some of my greatest periods of discomfort became catalysts for growth. They pushed me to make choices that completely changed the trajectory of my life.
Looking back, every major transition I have experienced began with discomfort. Choosing to go to University. Moving to South Korea. Creating distance from my family. Leaving the Education system. At the time, each decision felt overwhelming, uncertain, and, honestly, terrifying. But each one also brought me closer to myself. Every uncomfortable season taught me something that comfort never could.
If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know that this Substack is all about breaking intergenerational cycles and exploring the connection between the mind, body, and spirit. The reason I can write about these topics with so much conviction is because I’ve lived them. I’ve spent years in therapy, explored somatic healing, and developed a spiritual practice that helped me understand how dysfunction doesn’t just shape our thoughts. It shapes our nervous systems, our relationships, our identities, and the stories we carry about ourselves.
So today, I want to take you through some of the biggest turning points in my life. Not because I think my story is unique, but because I hope you might recognize pieces of your own. Sometimes the most uncomfortable chapters become the ones that quietly guide us toward the life we were always meant to live.
Post Secondary Education
Many young adults feel an incredible amount of pressure to pursue post-secondary education. From a young age, we are taught that this is the next logical step. Teachers encourage it, guidance counsellors prepare you for it, and the education system often makes it feel like there is a very specific path you are supposed to follow.
In Canada, that path can feel quite streamlined. Based on your grades, you are often encouraged toward either university or college, and there can be an underlying message that your academic success determines your future. Looking back, I don’t think the system necessarily measures intelligence as much as it measures how well someone can navigate rules & expectations.
And I was really good at following those.
I was a people pleaser, but I didn’t become one randomly. It was a skill I developed from growing up in a dysfunctional household. When you grow up in a home where you are constantly trying to manage the moods and emotions of the people around you, you become very good at reading the room. You learn what makes people happy, what might upset them, and how to adjust yourself accordingly.
In my household, so much depended on my dad’s level of sobriety. My mom’s mood would shift depending on whether my dad was drinking, productive, or “lazy” in her eyes. If she became angry, everyone in the house felt it. The emotional temperature of the entire home could change within seconds.
So, I learned how to read invisible energy.
I learned how to anticipate reactions before they happened. I learned how to avoid my dad’s incoherent ramblings and how to keep the peace when tensions were high. I also learned that one of the easiest ways to create safety for myself was through achievement. I could shine when I got good grades. I could feel valued when I was the student who was responsible, well behaved, and successful.
At the same time, there was another part of me that couldn’t ignore what was happening around me. I was the one who pointed out unhealthy patterns and questioned why things had to stay the way they were. I wanted my family to communicate differently. I wanted us to become healthier. Even as a kid, I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to accept the dysfunction as normal.
Unfortunately, pointing out those patterns often meant I became the problem. Instead of the dysfunction being acknowledged, I was often seen as the one creating conflict simply because I was willing to talk about it. Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t creating the tension. I was simply giving a voice to what everyone else was trying to ignore.
Those two parts of me existed at the same time. One part learned to find safety through achievement and by anticipating the needs of everyone around me. The other part refused to stop searching for something healthier. Looking back, I think they were both trying to accomplish the same thing. They were both searching for safety, just in very different ways.
So when I decided to pursue post-secondary education, part of that decision came from wanting more for myself. I wanted to move beyond the limitations I saw around me. I wanted to become a teacher, create a career, and build a life that felt different from the one I grew up in.
At first, my mom seemed incredibly supportive of this path. However, as university became more real and the financial responsibilities started becoming clearer, that support began to shift. Suddenly, the excitement was replaced with doubt. The numbers became the focus. How much would it cost? Was this really worth it? Was I making the right decision?
The thing is, I knew it was going to be expensive. I wasn’t going into this blindly. I had worked hard and saved money because I understood the financial commitment I was making. What I needed during that transition was emotional support. I needed someone to tell me that I could do it, that I was capable, and that taking this next step was worth it.
Instead, I felt like I was constantly having to defend my decision.
I even needed my dad’s signature for student loans, and that created an entirely new layer of control and tension. Looking back, this was when I started recognizing that my family had a lot of wounds around money, security, and control. The financial aspect became much bigger than just the cost of education. It became connected to power, independence, and my ability to make choices for myself.
But this is where the silver lining appears.
The very people who made this transition feel harder than it needed to be also pushed me to find my own strength. They made me question myself, but ultimately, I had to learn how to trust myself.
One of the biggest decisions I made was choosing to live in residence.
My mom strongly discouraged it because it was more expensive than living at home. From her perspective, it didn’t make financial sense. But after talking to so many people who had experienced university life, I knew I wanted to have that experience. I wanted to learn how to live independently. I wanted to meet new people. I wanted to have a chapter of my life that belonged completely to me.
And I am so grateful that I listened to that feeling.
Living in residence gave me my first real taste of freedom. It taught me how to make friends, how to navigate living away from my parents, and how to create a space that reflected who I was becoming. Even though I happily went home to do my laundry (because let’s be honest, free laundry is hard to pass up), I was beginning to build a life that existed outside of my family.
That little dorm room became one of my first true safe spaces.
I decorated it with fairy lights, a bunch of green items because it has always been my favourite colour, and photos that reminded me of the people and experiences I loved. It wasn’t just a room. It was an expression of me.
Not many people gathered in my room, but it was always a place where people could come in, make toast (because yes, that was a major obsession of mine at the time), drink french press coffee, and have deep conversations about life.
When I look back now, I realize that residence was so much more than a place I lived during university. It was one of the first times I experienced what it felt like to create a home for myself.
South Korea | Anyang-si
After I finished university, one of the most anticipated chapters of my life began to unfold. When I decided to become a teacher, I always told myself that I wanted to teach abroad first. Most people would go straight into teacher’s college after completing their undergraduate degree, and honestly, that is a great choice for many people. It gives you more opportunities within the education system and can create more financial stability long term.
However, something in me resisted going straight into another academic program. I had already accumulated debt from university, and I didn’t want to immediately put myself further into that cycle. More importantly, I wasn’t even completely sure if teaching was the path I wanted to commit to forever.
I had this itch to travel. I wanted to experience something completely different. I wanted to challenge myself and see who I was outside of everything I had always known.
Luckily, life had a funny way of aligning.
My best friend had taken a longer path through university, which meant we ended up graduating at the same time. Around that same time, she was dating someone who was originally from Korea, and he had decided to pursue his master’s degree at the University of Seoul.
Suddenly, the idea of moving across the world didn’t feel quite as impossible.
I originally thought I would have to do this alone, but somehow everything fell into place. Looking back, I can see how fortunate I was that I had someone familiar nearby while I was stepping into such an unfamiliar experience.
But before I could experience the excitement of leaving, I had to face the discomfort of letting go.
At the time, I was in a long-term relationship with someone from my hometown. My family loved him. On paper, he seemed like the safe choice. He was familiar, comfortable, and someone everyone around me expected me to stay with.
But deep down, I knew something wasn’t right.
He didn’t support my dream of moving to Korea. Instead of encouraging me to follow this desire I had carried for years, I felt like I was being asked to make myself smaller. He wanted me to change my plans, move somewhere else, and pursue a different teaching path.
The hardest part was realizing that this feeling wasn’t new. It was the same feeling I had experienced growing up with my family. Every time I had a dream, a desire, or an inner knowing about what I wanted, it was met with doubt, criticism, or pressure to choose a different path. Without even realizing it, I had found myself in a relationship that perpetuated that same pattern. Instead of feeling encouraged to follow my intuition, I found myself questioning whether my dreams were realistic or whether I was asking for too much simply because someone else couldn’t see the vision I had for my life.
At the same time, things at home were becoming increasingly difficult. I was working two or three jobs throughout university, trying to maintain friendships, manage a relationship, complete my studies, and somehow still became the emotional support system for my family.
I would come home after working late, make nachos, turn on my favourite shows, and try to have a moment of peace. Instead, my parents would start arguing. Suddenly, I was pulled into conversations about their relationship, their finances, and their problems.
Once again, I became the referee, the therapist, and the person trying to help everyone else regulate their emotions. I found myself listening to the same arguments, trying to mediate the same problems, and offering advice that nobody was actually willing to hear. It was exhausting because no matter how much energy I poured into trying to create peace, nothing ever really changed. I was carrying emotional responsibilities that were never mine to begin with, and I didn’t realize how heavy that weight had become until I finally stepped away from it. I was carrying so much responsibility that wasn’t mine to carry, and I remember feeling so deeply ready to leave.
I was ready to get the fuck out of there.
But leaving wasn’t easy. Right before I moved, some confusing things happened with people I thought were my friends. It made the transition feel even more uncertain.
Then I arrived in Korea, and reality hit me. It was nothing like the version I had created in my head. It was incredibly hot, we didn’t have air conditioning for the first week, and I remember feeling completely exhausted and overwhelmed. There were moments where I genuinely questioned whether I had made the right decision.
Looking back now, I realize that this was one of the biggest lessons of my life. I had spent so much time believing that discomfort meant something was wrong, but living in Korea taught me something entirely different. Discomfort does not always mean you are on the wrong path. Sometimes it simply means you are stretching beyond what is familiar. Sometimes it means you are growing into a version of yourself that could never have emerged if you had stayed comfortable.
Living in a country where English was not the first language challenged me in ways I never expected. Simple tasks became opportunities to learn. I had to become comfortable being uncomfortable. I had to ask for help. I had to navigate situations where I didn’t know the rules.
And somehow, I built a life there.
Just like my dorm room, I turned my tiny apartment into a space that felt like mine. It was small, but it was beautiful. It became a place where I could rest, reflect, and feel at home.
I still have so many fond memories of that apartment. It was tiny, but it was mine. I remember drying my socks on the heated floors during the winter because, fun fact, many apartments don’t have dryers overseas. There were so many little quirks about living abroad that made the experience unforgettable.
Korea taught me so much about myself.
It taught me that I was capable of more than I thought. It taught me that I could survive unfamiliar situations. It taught me that I could create safety within myself, even when everything around me was new.
Most importantly, Korea showed me that I could trust myself.
For so long, I had looked outside of myself for permission. Permission to make choices. Permission to pursue dreams. Permission to take up space. But moving across the world forced me to listen to the quiet voice inside of me that had been there all along. The voice that said, “Go.”
And I am so grateful that I listened.
Luna
Now, I know that getting a cat may seem like such a small choice. But for me, this cat completely changed my life. She truly was a CATalyst for change.
Haha. I had to.
After Korea, I came back home and decided to go to teacher’s college. I was also still in a long-distance relationship with someone who lived in Michigan, who I had met while I was living abroad. I thought that somehow we could make the relationship work while living in two different countries. At the same time, my brother had bought a home and offered me a room to stay in while I figured out teacher’s college and what I wanted to do with this relationship.
At the time, it seemed like a great opportunity. I was grateful that he was willing to help me while I transitioned into this next chapter of my life. However, emotionally, it became a much more complicated experience than I anticipated.
Living with my brother brought me back to a lot of the same patterns I had experienced during university. I was learning something new, working a part-time job throughout my program, and trying to balance all of my responsibilities. On top of that, I was living in someone else’s home and trying to figure out my place within that space.
My brother had given me a really generous opportunity, but over time, resentment started building between us. I felt like I was doing a ridiculous amount of work around the house and that it wasn’t being appreciated. I felt like I constantly had to prove that I deserved to be there by cooking, cleaning, and trying to make up for the fact that I wasn’t paying full rent.
Looking back now, I can see that this tapped into a much deeper pattern within me. I had spent so much of my life trying to make myself useful so that I could feel accepted. I learned how to anticipate people’s needs, take care of their emotions, and make myself smaller so that I wouldn’t become a burden.
I was doing it again.
I was adapting myself to fit into someone else’s life instead of asking myself what I actually needed.
One night, I went to my friend’s barn for one of our horseback riding sessions. I needed a break from everything that was happening. I needed a space where I could vent, be myself, and just exist without feeling like I was responsible for everyone else’s emotions.
That was when I met Luna.
She was a tiny kitten who had somehow fallen through the cracks of the barn. She had gotten trapped inside the walls and was meowing her little face off until they realized she was there. They actually removed part of the siding of the barn to rescue her, which, if you know farmers, is honestly pretty incredible. Farmers are usually practical people who don’t always stop everything for small things, so the fact that they went through all of that effort for this tiny kitten says a lot about how special she was.
The moment I saw her, I instantly fell in love.
I was helping my friend milk cows before we went riding, and Luna stayed tucked inside my jacket the entire time I helped with chores. She was warm, tiny, and completely content. Something in me just knew that she was meant to come home with me.
She was mine.
My brother was absolutely furious when I brought her home. And I want to be fair here because I don’t think his reaction came from nowhere. I had made a decision that affected his household, and I understand why he was frustrated. However, I do think the intensity of that moment revealed something important for me.
I needed to be honest with myself.
I was unhappy.
I had spent so much time trying to make everyone else comfortable that I wasn’t acknowledging how uncomfortable I had become. I had been ignoring my own needs because I was so focused on maintaining peace and avoiding conflict.
Luna wasn’t the reason I needed to leave my brother’s home. She was simply the moment that made me realize I couldn’t keep pretending that everything was okay. I needed my own space. I needed independence. I needed to create a home where I felt safe and where I didn’t feel like I had to constantly prove my worth.
And honestly, that realization was another example of how discomfort became a catalyst for change.
For so long, I thought choosing myself was selfish. I thought needing something different meant I was disappointing people. I thought I had to continue adapting myself to make everyone else comfortable, but Luna reminded me that sometimes the smallest choices can create the biggest shifts.
Sometimes choosing yourself looks like bringing home a tiny kitten from a barn and realizing that your intuition has been trying to guide you all along. She came into my life at a time when I was learning how to trust myself again. She gave me comfort, companionship, and a reason to create a home that felt like my own.
And honestly, she changed everything.
Leaving the Education System
After Luna came into my life, I had successfully moved out on my own. Although I continued moving between different apartments and houses throughout my years teaching, I slowly began extracting myself from my family’s patterns and dynamics. Every small step away allowed me to experience more independence and freedom from the roles I had been carrying for so long.
A huge part of this process was finding an incredible therapist who helped me begin my journey inward. South Korea had taught me how to experience external discomfort. It showed me that I could leave what was familiar, enter a completely unknown environment, and figure things out along the way. Therapy allowed me to do something much deeper: it allowed me to explore the internal world that I had spent so much time avoiding.
Throughout my entire journey, I had been dealing with major anxiety symptoms. Before university, my doctor prescribed medication to help me manage them. While the medication helped me through some difficult periods, I also remember feeling disconnected and numb. When I moved to Korea, I eventually came off of the medication, and interestingly enough, my symptoms began to improve.
Looking back now, I realize that my anxiety was not simply something that needed to be fixed. It was trying to communicate something important to me.
As I continued teaching, my anxiety symptoms started to return and become stronger. Although I was slowly reclaiming parts of myself, my family continued pulling me back into old dynamics. My mom continued treating me like a child, family drama continued finding its way into my life, and I kept getting pulled into situations that were never actually mine to carry.
But the reason I kept ending up in the middle was because that had always been my role.
Through therapy, research, and deep self-reflection, I started to understand that I had spent my entire life adapting to the needs of the people around me. I became the mediator. The helper. The person who could understand everyone’s perspective and make things easier for everyone else.
I became really good at taking responsibility for things that were never mine.
The problem was that while I was constantly trying to save everyone else, I was abandoning myself.
Teaching amplified this pattern. I was carrying the emotional weight of my family, the needs of my students, the expectations of my job, and the responsibilities I continued placing on myself. I was constantly giving my energy outward, but I wasn’t stopping to ask myself if I actually had the capacity to keep doing it.
I talk more about this in my article, Letting Go of the Saviour Complex, because this realization was one of the biggest turning points in my healing journey.
I had to learn that being needed by others was not the same thing as being loved, and that helping people was not the same thing as sacrificing myself. I also had to learn that I could care about people without carrying their emotional weight for them.
So, last year, I took a medical leave.
During that time, something unexpected happened. I experienced a spiritual awakening. It felt like I was finally coming back home to myself after years of being disconnected from who I truly was.
As I continued healing, I found myself drawn to the work of Carl Jung, whose ideas helped me put language to what I had experienced. One quote, in particular, stopped me in my tracks:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
- Carl Jung
When I first read those words, everything clicked. I realized that my spiritual awakening wasn’t about becoming someone new. It was about becoming aware of the unconscious patterns that had been quietly shaping my life all along. The roles I played in my family, the relationships I chose, the pressure I placed on myself to achieve, and the belief that my worth was tied to how much I could do for others had all been operating beneath the surface for years.
Jung called this process becoming conscious. I experienced it as a spiritual awakening. Different words, perhaps, but pointing toward the same truth. As those unconscious patterns came into my awareness through therapy, somatic work, and deep self-reflection, I finally had the opportunity to choose differently. Instead of repeating what felt familiar, I could begin creating a life that felt aligned with who I truly was.
I realized that I had spent so much of my life focused on other people’s emotions, expectations, and problems that I had forgotten to ask myself what I actually wanted.
My body had been trying to get my attention for a long time.
My anxiety became my check-engine light.
Instead of viewing my anxiety as something wrong with me, I started seeing it as information. It was showing me where I was out of alignment. It was forcing me to become honest about the life I was living and the things I needed to change.
I talk more about this in my article, Dis-ease: A Messenger, because this was when I started understanding that our bodies often communicate what our minds are unwilling to acknowledge.
My anxiety wasn’t my enemy. In fact, it was a messenger.
It was asking me to slow down, listen inward, and finally pay attention to myself. Through that process, I realized that I had been ignoring a dream that had always been there.
I wanted to create. I wanted to write. I wanted to publish books. I wanted to share my ideas and explore my creativity in a deeper way.
As much as I loved teaching, I realized that I had been sacrificing my creative energy because I was constantly exhausted from everything else I was carrying.
For years, it would have been easy to blame my family, my circumstances, or the people around me. And while those things absolutely impacted me, I eventually had to face another uncomfortable truth.
I had to take accountability for the ways I continued participating in those patterns.
Leaving education was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. Teaching gave me stability, financial security, and an identity that I had worked incredibly hard to build. It was something I had spent years proving myself in, and walking away meant stepping into a huge amount of uncertainty. It meant releasing a version of myself that I had spent so much of my life trying to become.
But it also meant choosing myself.
I had to radically accept that I could not wait for everyone around me to change before I allowed myself to create the life I wanted. I had spent so much time looking outside of myself for validation, permission, and reassurance that I had almost forgotten how to trust my own decisions. Leaving education forced me to stop asking, “Will other people understand this?” and start asking, “Is this actually what I need?”
And that meant becoming the villain in someone else’s story.
Learning how to protect my peace required creating firm boundaries with people, my job, and even friendships. Some people respected those boundaries, while others did not. Some reactions were subtle, and others were incredibly obvious. This was one of the hardest parts of my healing journey because I had spent so much of my life trying to be the “good” person. I wanted people to understand my choices. I wanted people to see my heart and recognize that I was not trying to hurt anyone.
Eventually, I had to accept that choosing myself meant some people might misunderstand me.
For so long, I believed that being a good person meant endlessly sacrificing myself. I believed that disappointing people meant I had done something wrong. I had to learn that there is a difference between being selfish and honouring myself.
There were moments where this process felt incredibly dark. When you build your identity around achievement, intelligence, and being useful, losing those identities can feel terrifying. I had placed so much of my worth into my education and my career that leaving teaching forced me to confront a question I had never truly asked myself before: who am I if I am no longer the person I spent my whole life trying to become?
I had to unravel so many stories I had created about myself. I had to confront beliefs that were never actually mine. I had to let go of versions of myself that were built around survival so I could make space for something more authentic.
I became goo.
I became an entirely new person.
Eventually, I broke free from the cage I had unknowingly built around myself. I finally admitted what I truly wanted. I wanted to become an author. I wanted to create. I wanted to follow my spiritual path and eventually become a tarot reader so I could help others connect with themselves in deeper ways.
Did I know exactly how any of it would work? Absolutely not.
This wasn't the first time I had trusted my intuition, but it was the first time I had taken such a radical leap of self-love. I was choosing myself without knowing exactly what waited on the other side. Discomfort had taught me that my inner voice was worth listening to, even when it led me somewhere uncertain.
I finished writing my book, and then I had to learn how to edit it with patience and grace. That process took time because I had to learn how to be gentle with myself while creating something that mattered deeply to me. I had spent so much of my life pushing myself to achieve, and this chapter required me to approach myself with compassion instead.
There were so many unknowns throughout this journey, and I had to accept that my family was not always going to be able to support me in the ways I had hoped they would. That realization was painful, especially because a part of me had always been waiting for them to finally show up differently during the biggest transitions of my life.
But this truth was also freeing.
It was freeing because I stopped waiting for someone else to give me permission to move forward. I stopped needing everyone to understand my choices before I allowed myself to make them. I began creating a life that felt like my own.
When I look back at every uncomfortable chapter of my life, I can see the silver lining that existed within each one. The moments I thought were breaking me were actually moments that were showing me where I needed to grow. Leaving home, moving across the world, creating distance from my family, bringing Luna into my life, leaving a career I worked so hard for, and rebuilding my identity from the ground up were all uncomfortable experiences, but each one brought me closer to myself.
I think that is the thing we often forget about discomfort. We are taught to avoid it, to fix it, or to escape it as quickly as possible. But sometimes discomfort is the very thing that reveals what needs our attention. Sometimes it shows us the patterns we have outgrown, the parts of ourselves we have abandoned, and the dreams we have been too afraid to pursue.
The silver lining is not that difficult experiences suddenly become easy or that we should be grateful for the pain itself. The silver lining is that we can transform what happened to us into something meaningful. We can use our experiences as information. We can learn from them. We can choose to create something different.
For me, discomfort became the doorway back to myself. It taught me how to trust my intuition, listen to my body, create boundaries, and choose a life that actually feels aligned with who I am. It showed me that the things I once saw as failures were actually redirections guiding me toward something more authentic.
So if you are currently moving through a difficult season, I hope you remember that discomfort does not always mean you are on the wrong path. Sometimes it means you are growing into a version of yourself that you have never met before.
Sometimes the very things that shake our foundation are the things that help us build a life that is truly our own.
Thank you so much for being here and supporting my work. I am so grateful to every single one of you who are making my dreams a reality ✨
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I’m so happy you wrote this 🥹❤️ hearing so many feelings I feel and all the moments you had every reason to not move forward and you chose yourself 🥹 the courage and bravery ❤️ you are so dang strong and it’s just so inspirational…it’s just so many of the exact feelings I feel about navigating family and not knowing if you are making the right choice 😅 the doubt that gets seeded is something that’s so familiar to me 😅 but you are so right how else can we build up the trust in ourselves if not for literally having to dig it down from deep within us 🥹❤️ I loved hearing how you faced all your challenges it gives me so much hope that maybe I can too 🥹 thank you for writing this ❤️🥹👏
Thank you for sharing this article, Anira.
It´s wonderfull