What it really feels like to heal

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the stuff that weighs you down.” - Toni Morrison

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This one is special. So feel free to read, listen to my voiceover or both.

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It has never been gentle. It has never been kind, considerate, or thoughtful. It is instead a force of nature, brash and boisterous, that enters our lives violently- crashing into walls, invading the dark crevices and toppling the picture-perfect lives we’ve spent so long creating.

I had been taught this image of healing as a body resting in peace, eyes closed and waiting in silence. It has never been that way for me.

This is the myth we believe about healing.

When we are submerged under the weight of our wounds, we finally learn the truth. It is from this place of knowing, that many of us never heal because we finally realize we can only know healing if we are brave enough to know pain.

It is no surprise that so many of us remain broken.

We choose hurt instead of healing when we don’t say the words. We choose hurt when we don’t confront the chaos. We choose hurt, when we forget ourselves to remind others of our presence.

You see, hurting is easy but healing is harder.

Healing doesn't knock on our door and ask when is a good time to visit. It is a conscious choice we must force ourselves to make while the pain is still consuming us. This is what makes healing brutal. As in “head pushed face-forward into the soil and struggling to breathe” brutal.

It is a battle with our mind to move beyond what clearly appears insurmountable. It requires us to delude ourselves into thinking the impossible is feasible.

To even consider healing, we must fool ourselves into believing the initial wounding is the most debilitating part. Yet, those who have taken the path know, in retrospect, it is the repair and restoration process that is the most jarring to our psyche.

Nothing is more terrifying than demanding that we become acquainted with parts of ourselves we have never known and feelings we have never confronted. When we fool ourselves into thinking that healing is anything but this, we have decided that we are not ready to see the depths of ourselves.

So we choose a quiet suffering, masquerading as peace, instead of experiencing the loud and disruptive transfiguration of our trauma into testimony.

This is why families can tiptoe over our legacies of anger and grief that healing demanded we traverse.

Yet there are those of us who are crazy enough to heal, not because we are courageous. We are exhausted from the silent labor of constantly hiding from the truth of who we know we could be. One day, the mask can no longer stay on, and healing becomes necessary to escape the shadows where we hide from the anguish we never wanted to face.

We can't escape looking directly at the wounds that disfigured our desire for perfection.

This is how the healing starts. It doesn’t ask for permission. It invades without warning and we try desperately to remain blind to it. We try to push it to the edges of our days and the outskirts of our thoughts. Yet it resurfaces when we least expect and most yearn for it- the moments when we are fighting for our existence.

So to save our lives, we grab hold of it.

And this is the conundrum- healing is both the distress we feel when we enter places that mercilessly reject our humanity and the air that keeps us breathing.

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“And I said to my body, softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’
It took a long breath and replied,
‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’”

- Nayirah Waheed

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One can only wonder how we have been orchestrating this magic for so long. Since birth, our souls, minds, and bodies have had to withstand words and actions meant to harm. Because of how painful that is, we wish healing could happen in isolation. It cannot.

When we attempt to heal in solitude, doing so means choosing not to live fully. Complete healing includes our communities and families and requires powerful momentum, found only after experiencing life’s valleys and pushing upward, carrying the weight of each other’s journey with us.

In this communion, the individual pain we’ve grown accustomed to can be shared among others, and they help us carry it. Little by little, the pain lessens, and we become less desperate to numb it. We are finally able to sit with the pain and feel it.

The healing journey shows us how we break and fall, making us question whether rising again is worth it. Many of us don’t continue because we’re so connected to who we once were, fearful of what it takes to move forward, although we know that the earlier version of us no longer exists.

Complete healing requires confidence—a knowing that life’s calamities will not drown nor define us but demonstrate our capacity to expand and evolve.

This is the most important part, which is so powerful that it is invisible. When the bleeding has disappeared and the gaping wound is present but slowly closing. This is when we learn to be patient enough to endure healing, which may take our entire lifetime.

It is when we learn healing was never a destination but how we go forward. It is a process that may never be completed.

But if we stop running from this path, our bones can regrow, our minds can be soothed, and our souls can be comforted. We can hear the guidance from ancestors who know both pain and healing, and from this learning, pour forth more than we ever could before.

Our vision also shifts—it becomes more urgent and clear because we know how quickly we could have lost everything if we kept re-creating the wound and never allowed ourselves to scar.

While we don’t choose when we get hurt, we do choose when we heal. In doing so, we get closer and closer to the person we were born to become.

And then, one day, the pain is gone.

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