I Thought I Didn’t Fit

A personal story about chasing identities, collecting modalities, and discovering that integration was the work all along.

I started my coaching practice in 2018 and tried to find a place for myself.

But I never seemed to fit anywhere.

I didn’t have a niche.

I didn’t have a program.

All I had was a Calling.

I just didn’t know what it was asking of me yet.

So, I started collecting modalities:

Positive Psychology Coaching.

Weight loss coaching.

Hypnotherapy.

Reiki.

Embodiment.

I even created my own modality: RHE (Reiki-Hypnosis-Embodiment).

But after all that, I still felt like I was trying to fit into places where I didn’t belong.

I worked online, modeling other coaches.

I joined spiritual communities.

I worked in a counseling clinic.

I kept changing environments: different healing spaces, different ways of working.

The scenery changed, but the feeling didn’t.

I was uncomfortable offering healing sessions and calling myself a healer never felt right to me.

Every time I didn’t fit, I came to the same conclusion:

I’m the common denominator.

There must be something wrong with me.

So, off I went to therapy. I uncovered stories, subconscious and generational patterns, too many to list. I learned how I coupled my worth with work and money.

No big surprises there.

But I still didn’t get clarity on my business, what I was offering, or where I belonged.

Clients would come and I’d be terrified.

I was scared someone would get hurt.

I was afraid I’d say or do the wrong thing.

I carried responsibility that was never mine to carry.

I worried about my pricing.

Too high. Too low.

I worried about my marketing.

Was it conscious, credible, and ethical?

What was my niche?

What problem was I solving?

More importantly: was I solving it, or just taking people’s money?

Eventually I realized no certification was ever going to give me what I was looking for or what I thought I needed.

I knew I wasn’t missing a modality, a niche, or a course.

I didn’t need to listen to another podcast or read another book.

No amount of therapy was going to make me trust myself.

No program was going to give me permission to clearly hear my Calling.

There was one nudge that followed me through every modality, every course, every therapy session:

Integration.

The word was everywhere.

It was treated like the final step.

“Make sure you give time to integrate.”

But no one really explained what integration was or how to support it. It felt like homework you were expected to figure out on your own.

That was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Not the breakthrough.

What came after it.

The messy middle.

The triggers.

Meeting resistance.

The body without the story.

I was tired of the story.

I’d leave a breakthrough session feeling lighter.

Resolved.

Three days later I’d be repeating the patterns I thought I ditched.

Nothing was wrong with the breakthrough.

The insight was thrilling.

But insight is not embodiment.

My nervous system needed to catch up to my experience.

The personal development industry sometimes made it feel like we operate like phones.

Install the upgrade.

Restart.

Carry on.

Humans don’t work that way.

At least, I don’t.

So I stopped chasing the next breakthrough and instead stayed with what surfaced.

I noticed resistance.

I listened to my body.

I paid more attention to physical sensation than story.

I stopped trying to fix every uncomfortable feeling and became curious instead.

Bit by bit, I trusted my own experience over someone else’s framework.

Nothing was wrong with me.

I wasn’t failing because I didn’t fit.

I was exhausted from trying.

I spent years being palatable, hoping I’d be accepted.

Waiting for permission.

But I was never meant to fit in those spaces.

Maybe what I was looking for all that time wasn’t fitting in.

I was looking to belong to myself.

The Calling had never wavered. Integration didn’t create it.

It quieted everything that was drowning it out.

We spend so much time trying to master and become the best version of ourselves.

Collecting more information, more strategies, more proof that we’re enough, ready, and certain.

But an acorn doesn’t become an oak by becoming a better acorn.

It becomes an oak by growing what’s already inside it.

Maybe that’s what integration is.

Not becoming someone new.

But creating the conditions for what has always been there to emerge.