I'm a fixer, unfortunately. I'm like, 'Oh, I can fix you.' But

In the hall of broken instruments and tender hands, a voice admits a costly vow: “I’m a fixer, unfortunately. I’m like, ‘Oh, I can fix you.’ But it’s not just guys I’m dating anymore. It’s this entire legion of young girls who tell me they need me to maintain any sort of sanity or peace.” Hear how the confession bends beneath its own weight. It starts as a private pattern—rescuing the beloved—and widens into a public burden: the pleas of many, arriving like waves at night. The heart that wants to heal finds itself appointed as lighthouse and harbor at once, and the keeper learns the ancient ache of those who carry more lamps than they have oil.

To name oneself a fixer is to reveal both mercy and hazard. Mercy, because the impulse springs from love’s reflex to bind the wound. Hazard, because people are not puzzles and souls are not machines. The vow “I can fix you” forgets that healing is a peace made within, not a repair imposed from without. The elders taught that help must honor the mystery of the helped; otherwise aid becomes annexation. In romance, the savior’s script turns the other into a project and the self into a workshop that never closes. Exhaustion steals in, disguised as devotion.

But the plea has grown larger than a single hearth. A legion speaks—young girls who write at midnight, who bring their trembling to the footlights, who say, “Hold our sanity for us while we learn how.” Fame multiplies need; visibility becomes a magnet for sorrow. What once was a duet of rescue becomes a chorus of dependence. Here the paradox sharpens: the singer’s craft—honest songs that name pain—creates kinship; kinship creates requests; requests create a net in which the singer herself can be snared, caught between compassion and collapse.

Consider a story fit for the teaching of apprentices. There was a nurse—call her Mara—who worked the night ward. She earned a reputation for staying past shifts, for reading to the lonely, for paying cab fare out of her own envelope. Patients began asking for her by name; colleagues leaned on her steadiness until it cracked. One winter she fell ill and learned the lesson she had not wanted: that pouring never stops until the pitcher is set down. Mara returned with a rule as simple as iron: three patients fully, and for the fourth, find help. Her care deepened when it finally had banks, like a river that stopped flooding and started irrigating.

History hums the same wisdom. Florence Nightingale walked among the wounded with relentless tenderness, yet she survived long enough to transform medicine because she learned to organize love—rotations, sanitation, training—so that care did not depend on one pair of hands. Or think of St. Francis: he embraced the leper, but he also founded an order, a community to hold what one heart could not. Their holiness was not the frenzy of solitary rescue; it was the architecture of shared burden. In this, they transmuted pity into durable peace.

What, then, is the lesson for the artist who hears a thousand private storms beating at one door? First, that empathy without edges dissolves into injury; second, that art is a lantern, not a life raft for all. You may light the path, but each traveler must walk. To the young girls who seek sanity: take the lyric as a compass, not as a crutch; to the fixer within: trade the promise “I can fix you” for the truer promise “I will stand with you while you learn to heal.”

Let actions be plain and strong. Set covenants of care: office hours for listening, and off-hours for restoration. Point seekers to circles, not just to yourself—hotlines, counselors, elders, peer groups—so that help becomes a woven net, not a single fraying rope. In love, refuse the project and choose the person: ask what they are willing to change and what you are willing not to carry. In work, make art that names hurt and also rehearses skill—breathing, boundaries, apology, rest—so that the song itself teaches peace. And for your own heart, keep sabbaths as fiercely as deadlines. Then compassion becomes sustainable, the legion becomes a community, and the fixer becomes what she was meant to be: not a mechanic of souls, but a midwife of hope.