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I’m Not Healed, and I Never Will Be
The way we think about healing from trauma and mental illness is all wrong
I have this image in my mind of what it means to heal.
The best healing is a process that puts things back together as if they’d never been broken in the first place.
The healed me knows how to get through a conflict without her heart racing and her cheeks turning red and her eyes filling with tears. She sets clear boundaries — with other people and, perhaps more importantly, with herself. She recognizes toxicity and turns from it rather than running to it. She can eat a cookie without eating the whole sleeve. She can say no when she needs to.
The healed me is a me as I’ve never existed before. She’s balanced and flawless. She’s the me I would have been if those things that broke me had never happened.
After years working on healing — countless meditations and affirmations; hours of therapy; holistic health programs and mindfulness exercises, hoping more desperately at each turn to find that healed version of myself just around the corner — I have just one question.
Where the hell is this woman?
