Becoming Is Not Enough — Until We Become Enough

Recently, I watched a Netflix docuseries about a beloved cultural icon — a public figure and entrepreneur whose life and career many of us have followed over the years. It was moving, honest in its way, and undoubtedly crafted to inspire.

But something about it sat heavy with me … really I felt, well I still feel deeply concerned.

This isn’t a critique of her story. In fact, I felt deep empathy. Like most women, I know what it’s like to carry the weight of invisible labor, the inherited pain of generations past which can produce practical difficulties when you’re trying to build a life, a business. I know what it’s like to build something meaningful over years, even decades.

But as I sat with what I was watching and feeling, I realized I wasn’t just witnessing her story. I was seeing a reflection of something deeper and more collective.

So I want to speak to it. Not with judgment, but with care. Because I believe we need a new conversation about what it means to become.

The Glorification of “Thugging It Out”

Let me start here: this documentary — like so many others before it — glorified the grind.

The story was framed around survival. Around the unrelenting need to prove. Around how hard it was, how much was sacrificed, how long it took. It was honest, yes — but it was only that part of the story. There was no room given to the healing, the inner transformation, or the reclamation of wellness along the way.

We’re used to this by now. Cultural narratives about powerful women almost always follow this arc:

“It was so hard. I suffered. I pushed. I endured. And eventually… I made it.”

But what do we gain from this being the only version of womanhood that gets airtime?

Where is the story behind the story?
Where is the healing?
Where is the becoming well?

And we need to speak to the toll this takes.

How many stories have we heard of women who can’t get pregnant, aren’t sleeping, whose hair is falling out? Women operating from chronic dysregulation, rushing, panic, depletion — burning themselves out in the process of trying to succeed.

Is this the only way we define strength?

The Missing Piece: Becoming Well

I know that many women who reach high levels of visibility, wealth, or success have access to tools for healing — from acupuncture and breathwork to plant medicine and therapy.

But those parts rarely make it into the story, you know — the witchiness of wellness — the intuitive, esoteric, body-based practices that actually sustain us.

And yet… that’s the part that matters most to me.

That’s the part that matters most to us — the ones building a new world.

I don’t want to only know what you built. I want to know what built you.

How did you recover your sense of worth?
How did you find your way back to your body, your softness, your truth?

When we only hear about the hardship, we internalize a dangerous message:

That suffering is required.
That proving is the only path to power.
That you must kill yourself — or your softness — to be worthy of success.

Hard pass, folks. HARD PASS.

The Weight of Unprocessed Wounds

 After my first plant medicine ceremony, I came to understand something I hadn't had the language for before, but it's that trauma has weight, like trauma has mass in the 3D.

When I say the 3D, I'm talking about the third dimension of reality. You know, here on earth where density and gravity shape our experience.

And here, unprocessed pain is like a backpack full of rocks. Every betrayal we haven’t healed, every narrative we've inherited, every wound we've buried, it weighs on us.

It actually slows us down. And so yes, it takes some of us 20 years to build something, not because we're incapable.

And yes, there are some external societal issues, not notwithstanding, but it takes some of us a long time to build something because we're carrying the weight of an unhealed lineage, the gravity of not enoughness, but that's not the world we're headed into.

The New Earth doesn’t require that of us—that is to keep carrying our pain.

The World That’s Coming

We’re in the Aquarian Age now — an age of air, of frequency, of speed. The distance between space and time is collapsing, you can feel this, things are moving faster. The slipstream is opening.

In this new paradigm, becoming well accelerates becoming successful — the energy now supports you better when you’re not dragging density behind you.

And this must be said explicitly:

Becoming well is becoming successful.
Let that be the new standard. Let that be the reframe. Let that be enough.

This is the future I live in, the one I long for us all to live in:

One where healing is seen as strategic.
Where softness is not shameful.
Where becoming well is not invisible labor — it’s honored, spoken, shared.

The Other Side: Burnout from Healing

Of course, we must also speak to the women on the other end of the pendulum.

The ones who’ve done the work — and now find themselves burned out from healing.
The ones for whom healing became the new identity.

The ones stuck in a loop of never feeling “ready” or “enough” to live, create, or lead.

I’ve been there too.
Poking, prodding, fixing, optimizing — endlessly.

At some point, we have to ask:

When will I let myself arrive?
When will I decide I am enough — not because I’ve achieved perfection, but because I’ve reclaimed my truth?

Soft Power Is Knowing You’ve Become

True soft power comes from sovereign enoughness — from knowing that your softness, your presence, your inner knowing are already whole and already enough.

It’s not about bypassing the pain or pretending everything’s fine, especially if it’s not.
It’s about recognizing that you don’t have to stay in the grind forever — not even the healing grind.

You are allowed to be well.
You are allowed to be soft.
You are allowed to be seen, not because you’ve suffered — but because you’ve transformed.

Let’s Tell the Whole Story, Okay?

To all the storytellers, producers, and platforms shaping the cultural record:

When we tell stories about women who are reshaping culture, can we also talk about what reshaped them?

Can we make room for the emotional and energetic legacies they had to heal?
For the ways they had to learn to re-parent their inner child?
For the rituals, tools, and inner revolutions that made the outer success even possible?

Let’s glorify the becoming well as much as we glorify the becoming.
Let’s redefine success to include stillness, softness, sovereignty, and spiritual wholeness.

Becoming well must be part of the process of becoming. But also — at some point — we have to declare:

I have become.

That is when the story changes.

That is when we change the story …

And the story needs to change, because the “hustle till you make it” soap opera is on its last leg friends.

© 2025 Lana Jackson. All Rights Reserved.