My Breakthrough With The Blowfish

How I Found My Soul Signal

I was 20 years old when I dropped out of college.

I woke up full of grief, shame, and disappointment: "Is this really what I've become?" The hopeful idealism of my youth had been smashed, somehow replaced with Grade A self-loathing. I felt powerless, stuck in a cycle that was beyond my understanding…

It was sometime before my 9 AM history class.

I'd been here before—similar pain, similar hopelessness—but this time felt different. I stood in my apartment bathroom, leaned into the mirror, and looked into my reflection. For some reason, my grandmother came to mind. She had always told me that nobody can lie from their left eye—the left eye holds absolute truth.

So, I looked. Really looked.

What I saw was a life that wasn’t mine. I was floaty, like I was watching someone else's story unfold while I sat in the passenger seat. There was a moment of stillness that felt like drowning, and I thought to myself, "I'm losing it." I'm losing my joy. I'm losing my happiness. I'm losing my soul.

I could see the writing on the wall with devastating clarity: if things don't change NOW, this is what the next month, year, decade of my life was going to look like. It wasn’t pretty—20 years old, stuck in cycles of addiction and self-sabotage. I knew my heart ached for something more.

I went to history class anyway. Dissociated the entire time. I sat in the back row, staring at the professor's mouth moving, hearing words but processing nothing. My body was there, but I was somewhere else entirely—above myself, watching this broken kid pretend to be a normal college student.

The walk home felt different. The signal that had been buried under months of pain was starting to break through the surface, and for the first time in months, I wasn't running from it. So, I pulled out my phone and called my dad. "Dad, I need to come home. I can't do this anymore. I'm not okay."

The silence on the other end felt eternal. I could hear him breathing, processing, choosing his words carefully. Then, his voice, steady and calm: "Okay, Brian. We'll figure it out." No lecture about throwing away my future. No disappointment about tuition money. No questions about what people would think. Just presence and acceptance.

He’s a good man.

That phone call with my dad was my first real act of self-agency—not the kind that comes from willpower or positive thinking, but the kind that emerges from finally telling the truth about your pain. In that moment, the heavy grief I'd been carrying transformed into something else entirely. Not happiness, I wasn't ready for that yet, but hope. Real hope.

Finding The Signal

Three weeks later, I found myself on a flight to the Big Island of Hawaii—it was there that the story I'm now living really begins.

For the next four months, I attended a wilderness therapy program, Pacific Quest. There, I spent my days working on a farm, engaging with the land, and reclaiming my joy. I spent my evenings in session with my therapist Kelly, processing my grief. She was soft, natural, loving—everything I needed but didn't know how to ask for. Kelly held my maternal transference with grace and ease.

I remember our first session vividly.

We sat on a stone wall next to the ocean. She asked me about myself and what followed weren't words. Just tears. I cried the entire session and she witnessed me in my pain. She didn't try to fix it, or justify it. She didn't try to get me to "see the positives" or frame this moment as a breakthrough. She simply sat in the pain with me. Incredibly powerful lesson.

Over the months that followed, she continued to hold space for whatever came up: rage, grief, confusion, hope. She never rushed the process, never tried to get me somewhere faster than my body was ready to go—until the moment when my big breakthrough finally came..

It happened suddenly, it happened absurdly, it happened while I was wearing a dress.

It was Halloween and I'd been caught in indecision for weeks, wondering if I was going to return to college after wilderness. I was considering the same school, same environment, same situation that I had just grown out of.

I was reflecting on the grief of maybe not seeing my college friends anytime soon, when I looked into the water and saw a blowfish. In that moment, it was like looking into another mirror. The fish was puffed up, beyond its natural state, and in it I saw myself so clearly—how stuffed I had been with suppressed emotion. All the swollen pain I'd been carrying around.

I had been that blowfish.

Distended with grief, anger, shame, and loneliness—all the feelings I'd been cramming down instead of letting flow. The fish's body was exactly how I’d felt standing in that bathroom mirror months before: unnatural, uncomfortable, and ready to burst. Seeing myself with such clarity gave me the answer I'd been struggling with. Suddenly, I yelled: “NO, I’m not going back!” I had left for a reason, one that I had yet to fully understand.

So there I was, sitting on this cliff, and I broke down. Loud visceral sobs, and my body started shaking. I was purging, I was emptying. I was surrendering, and I knew—yes, my time at wilderness was coming to an end, but it was also a beginning. The beginning of something great, and this new chapter couldn't begin where the other one ended. It had to be something new entirely.

Eventually the sobs turned to laughter as I realized I was still wearing my Halloween dress. Caught in the theater of the absurd, I couldn't maintain my composure. After about an hour of release, I dusted my dress off and returned to the rest of the group. I told them about my moment and we all had a good laugh. I held my head high, no shame in my tears, no humiliation in my humility. I told Kelly I wasn't going back to school.

She asked me what happened and I told her I felt it. My soul. It was louder than it had been in college, more clear and visceral. I knew I was onto something that deserved reverance. It was then that I realized these decisions weren't moments of self-agency, but soul-agency.

The biology of soulular repair, crystallized.

Thirteen Years Later

I've spent a lot of time thinking back to these moments.

Me and Kelly on a stone wall. Me, a blowfish, and a Halloween dress.

I was a 20-year-old kid, lost, damaged, terrified, yet there was something else working within me. Something I thought I was losing, but was only beginning to understand.

Looking back, I can see the incredible design of my own soulular repair—how it all connects to my years working as a live-in mentor for a young man with autism, a Masters degree in psychology (coincidentally from a school named Pacifica), and 7+ years as a mental health professional.

All I knew then was that these moments were real. The pain sacred.

People often think I hate talk therapy. This couldn't be more inaccurate. Kelly and that stone wall changed everything for me. What I've learned to distrust isn't therapy itself, but therapy that stays only in the mind and tries to think its way out of what can only be felt through.

Change always begins and ends with the body. I’ve experienced it first hand. Here I was pre-wilderness and just days before my breakthrough with the blowfish:

You can see it in these photos, the difference in my body, my posture, and my presence.

In that first image, I'm holding myself like someone carrying weight that isn't his to bear. Shoulders tight, smile forced, energy constricted. By the second photo, something has shifted. The emotion I'd been stuffing down for years had finally been released. My body looks free, natural, and at home in itself.

That's what happens when we stop trying to think our way out of what needs to be felt.

The body remembers how to breathe. How to move without armor and how to exist without apology. This is what soulular repair looks like—not some grand transformation, but a return to what was always there. It’s the difference between healing and revealing.

Finding repair on a soulular level t comes down to three things: Willingness, Humility, and Surrender. For me, it all started with Kelly, sitting on that stone wall, letting me cry.

Thanks for reading,

Brian Maierhofer

P.S. On July 7th, I'm opening slots for 1v1 work. If you're ready to stop thinking your way out of what can only be felt through, this might be for you.

More details soon.