On Turning Your Soul to Salt.
- Nick Smith
- Jul 8
- 4 min read

This morning, something happened.
I was in my own self-reflection. Aligning my mind. A quiet prayer to ground me for the day. And out of nowhere, the story of Lot’s wife came crashing into my head. It wasn't a gentle thought. It was a visceral, full-body recognition.
As I've been reflecting on my own life, the choices I've had to make, the things I've had to walk away from… it hit me in a way it never has before.
This isn't a story you read. It's a story you feel in your bones if you’ve ever stood at a crossroads, knowing that one direction is life and the other is a slow, familiar death.
That look back.
It wasn't curiosity. It was a failure of nerve.
We talk about Lot’s wife like she was weak, disobedient. A cautionary tale for rule-followers. It's bullshit. It’s a profound and terrifying story about the physics of attachment.
And let's be clear. This was never about wickedness. If it were, the story would be simple. Open and shut. But it’s not. Hell, I’d venture to say I’ve got more "wickedness" in my little finger than she had in her whole being.
This story doesn't resonate through millennia because of sin. It resonates because of what she was tethered to. It resonates because her heart was stuck.
Sodom wasn't just a city.
It was a system. An identity. The anchor.
And we have so many anchors.
It's the dream that became a cage, the one you mistake for your identity long after it has stopped serving your soul.
It’s the relationship you stay in, knowing you’re misaligned, because the fear of abandonment is a greater terror than the quiet agony of self-betrayal.
It’s the job that pays for your life but costs you your life force, a transaction you make every single day.
It's the family role that demands you shrink to fit, mistaking your obedience for love while your true self suffocates.
Leaving any of it feels like self-annihilation. Because the self you know only exists in relation to that anchor.
I’ve been there. My hand on the door, knowing the only path to life is on the other side, but my feet feel like they’re buried in concrete. Because everything that defines me, everything familiar, is in the room I’m about to leave.
The command wasn’t just "flee." It was "become a refugee from your own life."
The word attachment itself tells the story. It comes from the Old French atachier, which means “to nail to, to fasten.” Before that, a root meaning “to stake.”
Think about that. We literally stake ourselves to people, to ideals, to outcomes.
We nail our identity to them.
Is it any wonder that walking away feels like tearing the nails out of your own flesh?
This is where the choice happens. The one that defines everything.
The path forward is an unknown, a terrifying void. The path backward is ash and fire, yes, but it’s a familiar fire. You know its contours. You know its heat.
So you look back.
And in that moment, you don’t just choose the past. You sacrifice the future. You abandon the person you were about to become for the ghost of the person you were.
This is the part everyone misses. The pillar of salt isn't a punishment from God. It’s a diagnosis.
It is the perfect, horrifying metaphor for what happens when you commit the ultimate act of self-betrayal.
You become frozen.
Stuck.
A monument to your own past, forever looking in the one direction you can no longer go.
And salt? Salt makes the earth barren. Nothing can grow there. Ever.
That’s not a divine curse, that’s a spiritual law. When you abandon yourself to keep an attachment alive, you don’t just stop your own growth. You sterilize the very soil of your soul. You kill off any potential for new life, new joy, new anything, forever.
You become a living testament to a life that stopped living.
Damn!
This isn't about making a person or a situation wrong. It’s about the devastating clarity of seeing a misalignment.
It’s the moment you realize that in earnestly trying to mold yourself into the person you thought your partner needed, in trying to keep up with a path that wasn't your own, you've begun to lose your own shape.
And in that clarity, I saw the deepest truth: I could not give my partner the unwavering love and support she deserved without losing my own peace, without betraying myself at my core.
To keep going would be a disservice to us both.
She deserves someone who can walk her path fully, and I was holding her back by losing myself on hers.
So I did the hardest thing imaginable. I chose to step away.
I chose to stop holding myself hostage to a shape that wasn't mine, just to keep a connection.
I chose the uncertain path forward over the certain death of my own spirit.
I wish her a journey filled with a light so bright it illuminates her every step. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
Our paths simply diverged.
No blame.
No fault.
Just a painful, necessary truth.
And as for me, I have to follow my path.
I am learning, in the most real and visceral way, that my first duty is to honor my own boundaries. To meet my own needs. To stop the cycle of self-betrayal, no matter the cost.
The alternative is to become a statue in your own museum of pain.
And my journey is about life. Not memorials.
What are you staked to right now that you know is costing you your own soul? Tell me in the comments.
Follow for more on this journey.
If you're ready to stop betraying yourself, the tools are in the program. You know where the link is.
Comments