No Bad Parts

Turning the calendar to September 1st always feels like a milestone to me.

Summer is ending. Fall is coming. 🍁 A season that somehow feels both like reflection and beginning again. 🔄

This summer, especially, has been an exercise in finding a new normal.

After over a decade of traveling to Japan, I wasn’t sure what it would feel like to actually buy a second home here. But over nearly four months, slowly, subtly—and then seemingly all at once—something shifted:

We live here now. At least partly.

If you ever moved growing up, you might know the feeling. At first, everything makes you conscious of being an outsider. Kids in your new town say “soda” instead of “pop.” Shop in different places. Know rules (spoken or not) that you haven’t learned yet.

So you watch, listen, and try to figure out where exactly you fit…until one day you realize that, somewhere along the way, you stopped trying quite so hard to figure out how to behave and simply started to be a new version of yourself.

I’ve been thinking about how often life asks this kind of evolution of us, even when we don’t move halfway across the world.

• A child enters a new stage and changes your role along with theirs.
• A relationship begins (or ends).
• You lose someone, and have to learn how to live in a world that no longer includes them in the same way.
• You become a beginner again.
• Your body changes.
• A dream changes.
• You look back and realize you miss something about a person you used to be.

We are constantly learning how to inhabit lives that don’t look exactly like the ones we knew before.

Maybe part of finding a new normal isn’t deciding which version of ourselves gets to come with us. Maybe they all do.

The curious parts. The joyful parts. The grieving parts. The scared or angry parts. The parts still responding to something that happened years ago.

One of the ideas I love from Internal Family Systems is that there are are “no bad parts”. Even the parts of us that we find inconvenient or difficult often developed for a reason: to protect us, prepare us, or to help us survive something.

So instead of asking, How do I get rid of this part of myself? when I feel triggered, and a protective or disgruntled part rears its head,

I’m practicing asking:

• What are you trying to tell me?
• What are you afraid might happen?
• And do you know where we are now?

Growth doesn’t necessarily mean processing to the point of erasing past or challenging parts of yourself to become someone entirely new. Instead, it’s about creating enough safety, grace, and space in the life you have now, so that every version of you can finally rest in the realization: We made it. We are welcome to speak (and, when we do, we will be heard). We all play a part, and there is room for all of us to belong.