Healing is a word that gets tossed around so often that it feels meaningless at times. What does it mean to heal? Can you ever go back to who you were before? Should you even want to?
But I do know this: Healing isn’t linear.
After 33 years, I think that aspect of healing is starting to make sense. Some days I wake up and start to feel like myself again. I wear color, and everything around me feels a bit brighter. Other days, the smallest reminder of past pain pops up, and I am right back in the thick of it.
Those tiny moments of remembrance often feel the most painful. They can make you feel like a failure, like all of the healing work you’ve done has been for nothing. But I don’t think that’s true.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t erase your past. You can’t erase what’s happened to you. Yes, you can work on getting through things, and you can find ways to cope, but you cannot pretend that what you experienced never happened.
For every moment you feel like yourself again, you can expect a moment where it feels like your world crashes down around you. Being healed or on your healing journey doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that, among all of the terrible things happening, you still see the light. You can still wear the colorful dress and drink your iced coffee, and start to feel like yourself again.
The good and the bad will always exist together. The key is not letting the bad stop you from moving forward.
This past semester, I had a student with the same first name as my abusive ex-boyfriend. This had never happened to me before, and I was embarrassed that simply having to say or type his name upset me. After ten years, I can still barely say my ex’s name without having a physical and emotional reaction to it. Each time I had to address my student, I had to remind myself that it was just a name and not a reflection of the person.
By the end of the semester, I convinced myself that having this student was a way for me to make peace with the name. A name is just a name and not reflective of every person who has it. It sounds silly to say that out loud, but you have to have these kinds of conversations with yourself when you are healing. You have to talk yourself through the pain and remind yourself that what happened in the past was in the past. And it happening then does not mean that it will happen now.
I am healing, and that does not mean that I am perfect.
Healing is not perfect. The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you’ll find yourself on the other side of whatever is hurting you right now. You will run into past reminders and difficult moments. Some days they will leave you frozen, and that is okay. But, on other days, you will have the choice to stay in that difficult moment or fight your way through it.
I promise you: Healing is always worth the fight.
Photo by Cyrus Crossan on Unsplash
