Healing Is Not Pretty

Chapter 4 – Essay

It doesn’t look like what I thought it would.

What It Actually Looks Like

I imagined a path—well-lit, forward-moving. I thought I’d get better in tidy stages. Instead, I’ve been circling the same stories, shedding old skins and slipping into new ones, only to wake up some mornings feeling like I’m right back where I started.

You try everything at first. Anything to feel better.

You go to your friend’s sound bath, then to a psychic. You cut out dairy. Then meat. Then carbs. You start waking up at 5AM and journaling in gold ink like a sacred ritual. You meditate until your legs go numb. You buy the crystals. Study your natal chart. Fengshui your bedroom. Get acupuncture. You walk 10,000 steps a day and track your dreams at night.

You read books with titles like You Are the Medicine and It Didn’t Start With You and Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

But it doesn’t stick. Or at least not in the way you hoped. Because the real work doesn’t happen in your routines—it happens when you finally slow down enough to hear yourself.

Turns out healing is not a staircase. It’s a spiral. A circus. A forest path you blaze by walking blindly with your hands out.

There’s usually a moment that cracks you open. For me, it was sitting in that therapist’s chair, overwhelmed and over-identified with everything I didn’t understand yet.

I started asking so many things. The worst was,

What if there is something wrong with me?

But the more I chased answers, the more lost I felt. And that’s when it hit me: the process isn’t about fixing myself. It’s about meeting myself. Over and over again, in every messy version of who I’ve ever been.

The grief, the rage, the numbness, the disorientation—it all has a place. It all needed to be felt.

What makes it confusing is that you try to heal with the mind that was shaped by the very pain you’re trying to release.

Eventually, you surrender.

You start listening more and fixing less.

You stop rushing toward being “better.”

You hold your inner child through another wave of shame or confusion, and you whisper:

You’re not broken. You’re becoming.

That’s healing.

It’s nonlinear because you are nonlinear. A layered, multiversal self with versions in need of tending.

You don’t arrive at peace. You make room for it inside chaos.

And when you do, the world softens.