To stop fixing yourself is to stop treating yourself as a fault that needs repair. The word fix assumes a breakage, so pointing it at yourself assumes you're broken before anyone has looked. Learning a skill you don't have yet is still worth doing. What you put down is the repair job on you.
The booking form won't go through until Ottilie describes the fault.
Her washing machine has been rattling on the spin cycle for a week, a hard, metallic clatter, as if someone had put gravel in a biscuit tin. The repair company's form has a box with a small red star beside it: Describe the fault. So she types "Loud banging when spinning. Drum or motor, probably," and books the first slot.
The technician kneels on her kitchen floor in International City, opens a small panel low on the front of the machine and unscrews the filter behind it. Out come a hair clip and a fifty fils coin.
"Nothing's broken," he says. "Something got in."
On the receipt, beside Fault found, he writes "None". Beside Work done: "Removed objects from pump filter."
Ottilie reads it twice. She had named a fault because the form asked for one, and because a noise that loud had to mean damage. It didn't.
What does it mean to stop fixing yourself?
It means dropping the idea that you're a fault waiting for repair. A repair only has a job where something has broken, so a life of fixing yourself keeps confirming that you have. Skills you lack can still be learned. What stops is treating the person who learns them as the thing that needs mending.
Stopping fixing yourself never means stopping help. Keep every treatment, therapy and medication you have, and leave any change to it for you and your doctor to decide. If feeling broken has been with you for a long while, or has brought thoughts of harming yourself, make a doctor or a mental health professional your first call. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Why does fixing assume something is broken?
Because that's what the word is for. You fix a sticking hinge, a flat tyre, a sum that won't balance. Take the fault away and the verb has nothing left to do. So fixing yourself arrives with its conclusion already inside it, before any evidence is in: there's a fault, and it's in you.
My book Unbecome puts that difference as plainly as it can: "Broken needs fixing. Buried only needs finding."
Buried describes another situation altogether. Nothing in you went missing. Things were put on, often early and often for good reasons: ways of coping that worked once, and then stayed. The book has a phrase for them: "Old solutions, still reporting for duty long after the war they were built for ended." I've written about these survival identities on their own.
Broken orders repairs. Buried asks where to look. The freedom is in the removal.
If any of this feels heavy, speak to someone you rely on or a doctor before going further, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. Who Did You Become to Survive? is a free quiz built to show which of those old solutions you may still be running. Or read on.
Isn't trying to stop fixing yourself just one more fix?
It can easily become one. The words stop fixing yourself are an instruction, and the first thing many of us reach for after an instruction is a method. How, exactly, do I stop? Ask that, and the repair job has started again, aimed this time at the fixing.
Unbecome meets this near the end of its ninth chapter, where it imagines a question still standing at the back of the room: "but how will I know if I am doing it right?" The book's reply: "Look at that question's passport. Right is a fixing word. Doing is a fixing word."
I've walked into this one myself. For a while after things changed for me, I tried to be the best in the room at letting go. The book doesn't spare me: "You are allowed to laugh, because it is funny: a grown man competitively surrendering."
When the effort itself has become the habit, how to stop trying so hard is where I follow that one.
So what separates one more fix from stopping? Usually not the method. It's what the effort is pointed at. Pointed at a skill, it has something real to work on. Pointed at you, as the fault, it's the repair job again.
When is fixing the right word?
Plenty of the time. A burst pipe needs fixing. So does a gap in what you know: a language you've never studied, a car you can't drive yet, a length of the pool you can't swim yet. Chapter 9 of Unbecome says as much: "For missing-something problems, addition is the only medicine there is."
The same goes for care. A doctor treating an illness, a therapist you're working with, a course that teaches you something you want to learn: each has its own job, and anything that's helping you is worth keeping. None of that's in question here. A medical or mental health diagnosis isn't the same thing as the private sense of being broken, either: it's real, and your doctor is the one to talk to about it.
What the book questions is one particular repair job, the one aimed at you as a person, as though who you are were the fault. It puts its own question to you directly: "Which kind of problem are you?" It names two kinds: one where a piece is lacking, and one where "nothing is missing. Something extra is present." Why self-improvement doesn't work makes the longer case about adding.
Where does the word fix belong this week?
This article is no substitute for therapy or medical care; whatever care you have, keep it. This exercise keeps the word fix for the things it was made for. It isn't for drink or drugs, self-harm, symptoms of an illness, or someone who is hurting you. Those need a doctor, a helpline or a trusted person, and in a crisis, your local emergency services.
You'll need a household job you've been putting off.
- Find one small thing with a real fault. A loose cupboard handle, say. Choose something you can mend by hand: nothing electrical, no gas, no ladder.
- Say what the fault is, in a few plain words. Notice how easily a real fault can be named.
- Fix it, or book someone who can. Either way, it gets done.
- Notice how the word fits. The fault had a name, the repair had a job, and the word fix had something real to do.
That's the work the word was made for: a fault you can point to, and a repair that answers it. Stop the moment it brings up anything painful, and talk to a doctor, a helpline or someone in your corner, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Where does Unbecome fit after years of fixing?
Unbecome, my book, makes three choices that bear on what you've read so far.
- It leaves adding its place. From chapter 9: "Half of life is made of this kind of problem, and I still add things to myself happily: skills, languages, the odd embarrassing hobby."
- It won't let not fixing become the next project. A programme for not fixing would only be the old repair job under a new name. Unbecome names that trap outright: "A project is an addition. A regimen is an addition."
- It doesn't use buried as a kinder word for broken. From chapter 2: "I am not handing you a softer synonym, some kinder way of calling you damaged."
On rs-method.com/unbecome, the book's own web page, the argument reads like this: "Fixing presupposes broken, and you were never broken."
Hinges and tyres are the only things I'll call broken.
Rayyan's Amazon review of Unbecome says: "If self-improvement has stopped working for you, this explains why."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. The words you may have searched for are only the start of my book's subtitle. It goes on: Start Remembering Who You Are. Get The Paperback