Failure to Thrive: When Stuckness Becomes a Story We Live In
There’s a phrase in medicine—failure to thrive. It usually describes a child who isn’t growing at the expected rate. But I’ve been thinking… aren’t there a million ways that phrase applies to us all?
How many of us walk around spiritually underfed, emotionally stagnant, mentally looping? How many of us have internalized patterns so deeply that we no longer question why we’re stuck—we just live there? Thriving becomes an abstract concept, something meant for someone else, somewhere else. And so we settle.
The Infinite Ways We Stay Stuck
Sometimes it’s ancestral stories.
Sometimes it’s programming.
Sometimes it’s what happened in childhood… or what didn’t.
But often, it’s the stories about those things that keep us stuck. The identity we form around the pain. The subtle addiction to “poor me.” The familiarity of our own suffering. And the truth is—this stuckness can become a comfort zone. A place where nothing moves, but everything feels justified.
So we orbit the same thoughts:
“I should be further by now.”
“This isn’t even my expectation—I just inherited it.”
“What if I let go of the story and there's nothing underneath?”
And the biggest trap of all?
We start to believe that the stuckness is us. That this version of ourselves—depressed, overwhelmed, unsure—is permanent.
What If It’s Not About Expectations at All?
Sometimes the expectations aren’t the problem. It’s that they were never ours to begin with.
So we sabotage the dream because it doesn’t feel aligned.
We stop before we start because the success wouldn’t even satisfy us—it would satisfy the version of us we created to survive.
This isn’t failure. It’s feedback.
It’s your soul saying, “Wrong track. Reroute.”
But what if…
It’s not depression. It’s redirection.
It’s not failure. It’s refinement.
It’s not stuckness. It’s sacred stillness before the breakthrough.
Time to Choose
You can stay in the story.
Or you can write a new one.
You can keep replaying the ancestral script.
Or you can say: “It stops with me.”
I’m realizing—again and again—that every moment is a choice. To spiral deeper into the identity of limitation or to rise through the frequency of truth.
The truth that:
You are not the wound.
You are not the programming.
You are not the expectation.
You are pure, untapped potential in human form. But potential is nothing without movement. And sometimes the bravest movement is simply telling the truth about where you are.
So here I am, noticing my own patterns.
Noticing where I hide.
Noticing where I dim.
And choosing—daily—to burn the story down and walk through the ash.
Because I don’t just want to survive this life.
I want to thrive in it.
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