Which Twist Is Actually Yours?

Chip Conley, the founder of MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, recently shared something from a Jerry Seinfeld interview that I haven’t been able to put down. The idea that the blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with. He traced the word torture back to the Latin torquere, to twist. Not just pain. A pressure that contorts and reshapes. The kind that doesn’t just hurt you, but changes you.

I’ve been turning that over ever since.

Because most of us are carrying more than one kind of twist. There’s the kind that belongs to you, that is woven into who you are and what you’re here to do, and then there’s the kind that got handed to you somewhere along the way and you’ve been hauling it around ever since, half convinced it’s yours because you’ve been carrying it so long.

The trouble is, from the inside, they can feel remarkably similar. Both are uncomfortable and take energy. From the outside they could look like dedication, discipline, or just getting on with it.

But they’re not the same thing at all.

I’ve been on my shamanic healing path for 25 years. The work asks a lot. When you’re genuinely holding space for someone in real pain, you don’t just witness it from a comfortable distance. You sit in the discomfort with them. You feel the energy of what they’re carrying, (ideally without absorbing it) because that’s how they get enough support to process what they couldn’t process alone. It’s a twist. A real one. And it will never not be.

That twist is mine. I know it in my bones. And it’s welcome, because the discomfort of helping someone is worth it.

Marketing, on the other hand, has been a slow and grinding revelation. Years of trying to make peace with something that was never going to fit, trying different strategies, different framings, telling myself it was just part of the deal. And eventually arriving at the realisation that it wasn’t resistance I needed to overcome. It was discernment I needed to trust. This particular twist was never mine. It got handed to me by a business culture that decided visibility and packaging were everyone’s job now, regardless of what your actual work is.

I’m still having to deal with it, but recognising that distinction has been one of the more quietly liberating things I’ve done. So here’s the question I want to leave with you, because I think it applies far beyond healing work or business.

Look at the things that are hard in your life right now. The obligations, the roles, the ways you push yourself, the friction you live with daily. And ask, honestly, which of these twists are genuinely yours?

Which ones are reshaping you into something more fully yourself? And which ones are just… weight? Weight that arrived through someone else’s expectations, or cultural conditioning, or a story you inherited so early you forgot it wasn’t originally your story?

Here’s what makes this harder than simple self-awareness. Many of the twists we’re carrying weren’t even generated in our own lifetime. Beliefs travel through families the way physical traits do, silently, efficiently, without anyone signing off on the transfer. Your grandmother’s conviction that visibility is dangerous. Your father’s relationship with worthiness and work. The ancestral understanding of what people like us are allowed to want. These arrive in us feeling like our own thoughts, our own resistances, our own particular flavour of stuck. Recognising them for what they are, inherited weight rather than personal truth, can be disorienting at first. If this wasn’t mine, what else isn’t? But that question, sat with honestly, is where something genuinely new becomes possible.

Because there’s a real difference between the struggle that opens you and the struggle that simply grinds you down. Between the welcome discomfort that belongs to your path and the discomfort that belongs to someone else’s idea of what your path should look like.

Imposed friction and meaningful struggle are not the same thing.

And knowing the difference might be one of the most important questions you ever sit with.

Want help answering some of those questions? Book a free 30 minute Truth Map call, to come home to your inner knowing. Speak what’s real, and map your next move from truth, not pressure. Click here: https://bit.ly/MyTruthMap