Balance Is a Soul-Killing Myth: You Don’t Need to Be Centered, You Need to Be Alive

A personal essay ahead of the May 12th Scorpio Full Moon on what balance is really costing you—and how to reclaim your aliveness when your life no longer fits.

Welcome to How To Be A Whale, a hand-crafted offering for those who feel the pull of the moon, the hum of the body, and the poetry in the pause.

I’m Jem Ember, and this space is my ceremony. Here, I gather threads from astrology, somatic mysticism, and ritual craft to weave a life that listens deeply—to nature, to inner truth, and to the seasons of becoming. Each post is a love letter to slowness, aliveness, and mystery. If it speaks to you, I invite you to support this work. Your presence here helps keep the hearth lit.

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When Balance Becomes a Cage

Ernst Haas, Mustang on the set of The Misfits, 1960

Yesterday, during a life catch-up and astrology reading, someone looked at me, half-laughing, half-defeated, and said:

“How many times am I going to hear the advice to live my life with more balance before I finally take it?”

It struck a chord—not because I thought she needed balance, but because I could feel how deeply the question had lodged itself inside her. Like a splinter coated in wellness-speak.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t recommending balance. Not to her. Not to anyone wired the way she is.

She is someone built for intensity. For movement. For the thrill of new perspectives, the sacred high of creative flow, the deep plunge into grief or rage or revelation and the climb back up with stories in her hands. She’s an underworld traveler. A stallion in a glass corral. The idea of “balance” doesn’t soothe her nervous system—it kills her spark.

Balance, as most people mean it, isn’t regulation. It’s domestication.
It sounds like wellness. It smells like eucalyptus and self-discipline. It photographs beautifully. But beneath all the beige Pinterest kitchens and curated morning routines, it’s often a call to flatten yourself. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too tired. Don’t be too angry, too ambitious, too emotional, too much.

And lately, I’ve been hearing that same call in other places, too.

Work-Life Balance – as if you’re not a whole human during both
Balance your hormones – often used to sell supplements, shame women
Financial balance – moral purity through budgeting

Inbox Zero – spiritual emptiness disguised as efficiency
Just Take the High Road – usually means: “stay silent and take the hit”
Stay Consistent – the enemy of cycles, seasons, and real life

Last week, one of my posts on the UX of hiring went viral on LinkedIn. Suddenly I was receiving a flurry of unsolicited advice about my UX portfolio. “Make it more recruiter-friendly.” “Strip away all the fonts.” “Just show the app flows.”
The message was the same, again and again: keep it clean, keep it palatable, tone it down.

They were trying to pull me toward balance—toward the middle of the bell curve—toward what’s expected. But in doing so, they revealed how little they actually understand UX. Because UX isn’t just about clean flows and vanilla case studies. It’s about relationship. About story. About intuition. About real human aliveness in systems that often strip people of exactly that.

Their version of “balance” would make my work disappear.

Balance, as we’ve been taught to pursue it, isn’t about harmony. It’s about predictability. It’s the performance of being okay. And it robs the world of the very thing that changes it: people who are fully, unapologetically alive.

The Performance of Wellness

I’m not against stability. I’m not glamorizing burnout or constant chaos. But we have to stop acting like the goal of life is to hover in the middle of everything, avoiding edges, managing perception, controlling risk. Some of the most important things we’ll ever do—grieve, fall in love, have children, start over, burn out, break through—are inherently unbalanced acts.

It always sounds so reasonable:
Keep it clean. Be balanced. Make yourself easier to understand.
But the more I hear it, the more I wonder what it’s really costing us.

Because how many of us are out here chasing balance—
when what we really need is to feel alive?

How many of us are numbing our instincts in the name of being palatable?
How many of us are flattening our work, our voices, our rhythms—just to fit inside someone else's framework of “wellness,” “professionalism,” or “success”?

Some lives aren’t meant to be balanced.
They’re meant to be devoted.
To chaos. To clarity. To cycles. To what’s real.
They’re meant to move like weather, not clocks.

So maybe the real question isn’t how to find more balance.
Maybe it’s this: What would change if you stopped trying to be balanced… and started to be alive? If something in you already knows the answer—
you’ll want to keep reading.