Healing didn’t come in a single moment. It came in fragments—slow, quiet, sometimes unnoticed. It wasn’t linear. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t the “aha” moment people make it out to be.
It was work.
Real, raw, exhausting work.
It was waking up and taking my meds even when I didn’t feel like they were helping. It was going to therapy when I wanted to cancel. It was sitting with feelings I used to run from. It was learning how to speak without shrinking, how to cry without apologizing, how to rest without guilt.
It was learning how to forgive myself—not just for the things I did in survival mode, but for the ways I abandoned myself long before anyone else ever could.
Sometimes healing looked like crying on the floor.
Sometimes it looked like laughing with friends.
Sometimes it looked like doing nothing at all—and finally being okay with that.
People talk about healing like it’s a destination, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s a choice we make over and over again. To stay. To feel. To try. To reach out. To show up. To speak truth even when our voice shakes.
Healing is messy. Healing is nonlinear. Healing is lonely, then beautiful, then hard again.
But healing is possible.
And even if I fall, I now know how to rise.
Not because I’m stronger.
But because I’m finally learning to be gentle—with the parts of me that never had that before.
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