This Is What Healing Is Supposed To Look Like

Healing isn’t something you can gain overnight. You don’t plant a seed today and expect it to grow tomorrow. Sometimes, healing is an extensive process. It’s nourishing; at the same time, can also be draining. Healing from the things that broke you can be beautiful, but on most days, it isn’t.

It isn’t like waking up one morning and suddenly you feel you’re okay. It can be. But there are days where your body feels like being glued to your bed. Where a day of resting becomes a month of slacking off. When acceptance should be the end goal but you’re still stuck at denial.

Sometimes it comes in a form of self-withdrawal—shutting people off, isolating, and getting lost—and coming back after a few weeks as if nothing happened. Sometimes it’s writing legibly on paper until one smudge ruins it and you need to start all over again. It’s messy. Tough. Laborious.

Sometimes healing is controlling your emotions and trying to hide the tears that are about to fall down. It’s swallowing the pain, playing with your anger like darts—probably not the kindest thing you’ll ever do to yourself, but it does help.

Healing is sometimes repeating a process over and over again, getting stuck on one phase and deciding to go back for safety. Healing is supposed to be scary but exciting. You feel the clatter inside you when you’re trying to be better, and the next thing you’ll know, it’s another invitation to wallow in pity again. Healing includes choosing the latter. Sometimes, you need to cry out, to break down in order to break through.

Healing is sometimes feeling you’ve already done it until it decides to break you into pieces and you need to start over again. Sometimes, it’s not knowing how to anymore. Because healing is losing yourself again in the process, but it means finding yourself in another.

When I say healing isn’t planting a seed today and expect it to grow tomorrow, I don’t mean it won’t. It will. But it will be a series of tomorrows. Tons of waiting, tons of looking forward, tons of wishful thinking. The best kind of healing is the one you surely worked hard for. This includes the stitching, the patching up, and painting the broken parts to make them look new again.

Healing isn’t supposed to be easy. Healing is supposed to be worthwhile. You know the feeling when you reminisce about the things that broke your being and you no longer feel the remorse in it? Instead, you smile and feel the sense of relief deep within you. That’s how healing is supposed to look like. 

This may look hard to achieve for now, but believe me when I say that there’ll be a time when waking up is the best thing you will look forward to before you close your eyes at night. When walking alone doesn’t hurt you anymore. When you no longer taste the bitterness on your tongue when someone else talks about love. When solitude makes you whole. When you look back on the things that have happened and you feel the gratefulness that you are not part of it anymore. It will never be easy, but believe me, it’s worth it.

Healing is supposed to take the form of your biggest aspirations in life. So when you are able to imagine how you want to see yourself in the next few weeks, when you know where you want to be years from now, that’s how healing looks like.

Healing is supposed to be like you. A happy you. A fulfilled you. A confident you. An independent you. When you are able to learn to dwell with the love you have within yourself, that’s how healing is supposed to look like—self-love.