Tending the Garden: Growth, Patience, and the Parts of Ourselves We Try to Pull Away

By Juliana Mott Fabio, LCSW

I recently found myself in conversation with someone who was feeling stuck—uncertain about what her next step should be and frustrated by how long change seemed to be taking. There was a sense of urgency in her voice, a desire for clarity, for movement, for something to happen.

I listened, recognizing a feeling I hear often in my work as a therapist—and one I know personally. That uncomfortable in-between space where something is shifting, but nothing is yet clear. Where you know you’ve outgrown something, but you’re not quite sure what comes next.

At some point in our conversation, we began talking about gardening.

It felt like a natural place to land.

We talked about how much of gardening happens underground, in the dark, unseen. Seeds are planted, but nothing appears for weeks, sometimes months. There’s no visible progress, no immediate reward—just trust that something is happening beneath the surface.

Daffodils, for example, are planted in the fall. All winter, the ground looks unchanged. And then, almost unexpectedly, they emerge in the spring—bright, alive, and right on time.

Life can feel like that too.

So much of our growth happens in ways we cannot see. Internally. Quietly. Slowly. And yet, we often expect ourselves to know what’s next right away, to move quickly, to have clarity before we’ve allowed enough time for something to take root.

We also talked about what it means to tend a garden. It’s not something you do once and walk away from. It requires regular attention—checking the soil, adjusting to the weather, noticing what’s thriving and what needs support. If you ignore a garden, it doesn’t stay the same. It either withers or becomes overgrown.

The same is true in our lives. Growth isn’t a one-time decision; it’s an ongoing relationship with ourselves. It requires presence, patience, and a willingness to respond to what is actually happening, not what we wish were happening.

And then we talked about weeds.

This part of the conversation stayed with me.

I shared something I had learned in a gardening class this past year—that weeds, the very things we often rush to pull and discard, are actually some of the most nutrient-dense plants in the garden. They appear because the soil is lacking something. They are, in a way, responding intelligently to what is needed.

There’s even a practice where you can take those weeds, place them in a jar with equal parts raw sugar, and let them sit. Over time, a golden liquid forms at the bottom. When diluted with water, that liquid becomes a powerful fertilizer—one that feeds the garden exactly what it needs.

I remember pausing as I said this, because it felt like more than a gardening lesson.

So often, we treat parts of ourselves like weeds. The parts that feel uncomfortable—impatience, self-doubt, jealousy, fear, anger. We want to pull them out quickly, get rid of them, distance ourselves from them. We see them as problems rather than information.

But what if those parts are telling us something important?

What if they are showing us where something is missing, where something needs attention, where there is an unmet need beneath the surface?

And what if, instead of discarding them, we learned how to work with them?

In therapy, we often talk about integrating all parts of ourselves—not just the ones that feel easy or socially acceptable. Our “shadow” parts are not separate from us; they are part of our human experience. When we approach them with curiosity rather than judgment, they can become sources of insight, empathy, and compassion.

Just like the weeds in a garden, they can be transformed into something that supports growth.

As our conversation came to a close, there was a softening. Not because her uncertainty had disappeared, but because her relationship to it had shifted. She could begin to see that not knowing doesn’t mean nothing is happening. That something may already be growing beneath the surface.

And that her impatience, rather than being something to push away, might be something to listen to.

We don’t get to rush the seasons of our lives. We don’t get to force clarity before it’s ready. But we do get to tend to what is here—to care for ourselves in the process, to stay present, and to trust that growth is unfolding, even when we can’t yet see it.

Life, in many ways, is a garden.

And we are both the ones tending it—and the ones being grown.