Healing Isn’t Always Pretty (And That’s Okay)

When people talk about healing, they often paint a peaceful picture: meditation, warm baths, journaling under the sun. And yes, those moments exist. But they’re only one side of the story. What most people don’t talk about is that healing often looks like crying at 2 a.m. for reasons you can’t fully explain. It looks like confronting truths about yourself you spent years running from. It looks like letting go of people you still love. Healing can be brutal before it’s beautiful.

For me, healing meant facing a version of myself I didn’t want to meet. I had to unpack habits I thought were just “who I am” and trace them back to pain I never addressed. I had to stop blaming everyone else and start asking harder questions: Why do I react like this? Why do I chase people who treat me like I’m hard to love? Those weren’t easy answers. Sometimes, healing felt more like breaking than rebuilding.

There were days I felt like I was going backward, not forward. Days I was exhausted just from existing. Days I questioned if all this inner work was even worth it. But then… came little wins. Moments when I didn’t react the same way I used to. When I said “no” and didn’t feel guilty. When I chose peace over proving a point. That’s when I knew healing was happening — not loudly, but silently. Like wounds closing beneath the skin.

And here’s what I’ve learned: healing isn’t about becoming a “better” version of you. It’s about becoming a more honest one. You lose the parts of yourself that were just survival tactics. And in their place, you find someone softer, wiser, more rooted. Someone who doesn’t need to pretend anymore.

So if you’re in the thick of it right now — if your healing doesn’t look poetic or clean — that’s okay. It’s still healing. Messy progress is still progress. And one day, you’ll look back and realize you were growing the whole time, even when it didn’t feel like it