healing.

healing is hard

it is not a quick elevator ride

effortlessly rising you to the top of the world. it is not even an escalator that helps you glide up

up and away. Healing is climbing the fire escape in the pouring rain and healing is slipping on

those stairs and falling down a couple steps. It is not linear, but you will reach the window. Some

days, the window is your grief and sometimes you are shattering your self loathing. The shards

are sharp, and will draw blood, but man will it feel good when you break in.

When you get the days where it’s all you can do, keep climbing. Even if it leads you nowhere,

stay on the ladder. It may not be today, but you will get back into the apartment building. It

won’t be pretty and it won’t be easy, but putting on dry clothes will feel incomparable.

Here’s the thing about healing, people don’t often think they need to do it because people think you have to have a big trauma to heal from. While yes, a trauma can be a big event, it can also be exactly what the word states: something that caused you trauma. It can be as big as growing up without a parent, to living through a global pandemic to losing a lifelong friend. Point being, if it caused you trauma, it is important. There are instances where you don’t even realized you’ve experienced trauma. So many of us (myself included) are guilty of comparing trauma and de valuing what we feel because ‘someone has it worse.’ There is no worse or better, trauma just IS and with that, healing needs to happen.

The past couple of months, I have identified a few things in my life that I need to heal from, and I have taken the initiative to start that process. Healing is terrifying, not enough people talk about that. I see this in myself especially, I find myself hesitant to think about what it’ll be like when i’m healed, and not because I don’t want it, I do. I’ve just spent my whole adult life with my personality comfort zone being the sad one or the self depreciating one, it makes me wonder, who am i without those things? Will my friends still like me if i’m not broken? Logical me knows that I’ll still be me, but emotional me is terrified because I don’t honestly know if I have an identity beyond my struggles. I’ve learned that it’s very common to feel like this when you are an extreme people pleaser, like myself. You spend so long conforming to what people expect and being everything for everyone else that you just… lose yourself. It’s a very difficult thing to come to terms with, being over halfway through my 20’s and realizing that I don’t really know who I am.

I do believe it’ll be worth it, facing and healing from this weight that’s been on my soul for years but i’m scared. Scared that I’m not strong enough to re live it all, scared that I’ll always be like this, but even more so that I won’t. It terrifies me to think about all the possibilities of who I might be without the crushing weight of anxiety. I want you to know that it’s okay for you to be scared too, cause this facing inner demons stuff is HARD. but it will be worth it. we just have to keep telling ourselves that.

As my idol Taylor Swift once said, “today is never too late to be brand new’