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SELF-AWARENESS
I Thought Healing Would Feel Like Progress but It Felt Like Grief
My experience with creating positive change
I used to imagine healing like it felt akin to climbing a mountain. Like I’d crawl out of the pit I was in, wipe the dirt off my hands, and start walking uphill toward some cleaner, brighter version of myself.
God, I wanted that moment so badly — that moment where I’d feel fixed. Where I could finally exhale and say, “I made it.”
But there was no summit. No finish line. Just me, sitting on my bathroom floor at 2 AM this past winter, sobbing into a towel so my family wouldn’t hear me, realising that the healing I’d been chasing for years felt nothing like victory…
It felt like mourning.
There was no glowing sense of accomplishment. Just the quiet grief of letting go of a version of myself I had relied on since I was six years old. And realising that I was nothing like the person I’d once envisioned becoming.
Even if the old me was hurting, even if she made a mess of things, she was familiar. She had kept me alive through my parents’ divorce, through school when I was drowning in anxiety attacks, through broken friendships that hollowed me out.
