Healing is endless.
We like to imagine healing as a straight path. You start in one place, move forward, and one day you reach the end with everything neatly resolved. No jagged edges. No aching spots. No unexpected emotions sneaking up on you. But healing is much more circular and perpetual than that. Something I like to call a spiral…a mental breakdown (or a “menty b,” if you will).
We get caught up on the whole moving on thing and put a timeline on ourselves, deciding how long something “should” take before it stops making us feel so much. But healing doesn’t work like that. I like to think of it as something we move forward with, not move on from. Healing is individual to each of us, shaped by past wounds, our support systems, and our own resiliency. And yet, we are so hard on ourselves…How dare we feel our emotions and sit in them for a while?! (cue the sarcasm).
And that circular part of this mental spiral (the menty b moment) can sneak up on us. You loop back to places you thought you’d left behind. You revisit memories you were sure you’d already processed. You feel emotions you thought you’d outgrown. And sometimes, it’s disorienting. You might catch yourself thinking, Why am I here again? Haven’t I already dealt with this?
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, or we can’t figure out why we keep returning to this place, why something is still lingering, or why healing takes so much time. It can feel like starting over. But you’re not. And it’s okay.
Several years ago, during one of the toughest seasons of my life – juggling way too much, making big life decisions, and, true to form, putting on a tough exterior (because as someone who shows up for others every day, doing that for myself feels foreign and unfair…I am working on it in therapy, okay?!), I came across a quote that changed my life:
You let time pass. That’s the cure. You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back up through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun, and you close your eyes and lean your head back and realize you’re okay.
That…is healing. And whenever I’m struggling to move through something, I remind myself that someday I will be okay, and that it’s okay to be patient with the process.
Each time you return to that “WTF am I doing back here?” place, you’re standing there with more insight, more resilience, and maybe a little more compassion for yourself. What once felt like an unmovable wall might now be something you can lean on, walk around, or even chip away at. We may just need a good cry and to sit in those feelings for a minute…Anytime someone calls me crying, I give them a huge, “LET IT OUT“. Sometimes we feel like we need permission to just feel through this shit. You don’t, but if it helps, picture me yelling “LET IT OUT” at you, thus giving you the permission you need. Crying is healing.
In my work, I see this often. People circle back to parts of their story they thought were closed chapters. Not because they failed at healing, but because they’ve reached a place where they can see it differently. It’s not regression. It’s new perspective. It’s a trigger or a wound they didn’t know existed. It’s a lightbulb moment that brings them back to that place of emotion and healing as they grow and move forward. It’s a beautiful thing.
And it’s not just about big, life-altering traumas. This perpetual circle, the mental spiral, this menty b shows up in everyday moments, too. Maybe you thought you were over a breakup, but a song still catches you off guard. Maybe you forgave someone years ago, but a familiar situation stirs up feelings you didn’t expect. Maybe you’ve learned to manage stress, but a small trigger leaves you rattled in a way you can’t explain, bringing you right back to a place you thought you were safe from returning to.
We just can’t help it sometimes. For me, it’s situations in general that catch me off guard…almost like life is testing parts of me I thought I had moved through. A certain person or circumstance brings me back to a chapter I thought I’d closed. When I realize I’m “not healing,” it becomes a conversation with myself: What am I supposed to be learning here that I’m going through this again?
When this happens, it’s easy to judge ourselves, to label it a setback or a weakness. But what if it’s neither? What if it’s proof that we’ve grown enough to handle a deeper layer of the same wound? Or that this time, we identified it whereas before, we stuffed it away into Pandora’s box or kept living in our cute little bubble of denial. Maybe this time, we are able to handle our emotions differently.
Every time you’re brought back into healing, you’re not in the exact same place, you’re a little higher up. You’re seeing things from a slightly new vantage point. Yes, the landscape is familiar, but your view has widened. It’s valuable for us to go through these times.
By now, I’m sure you’ve thought of at least one big moment that’s taken, or is taking, a lot of time to heal. Think about all you’ve gained from that. Think about where you are today because of it. Maybe we don’t like the memories or the pain we went through before the healing, but it’s part of our journey. It’s how we see the beauty in the world; because we have experienced something that we needed to heal from.
That’s what progress really looks like. Not erasing the past or moving on, but moving forward and meeting it again with more strength, more tools, and more understanding than before.
And yes, sometimes healing is work. Therapy, journaling, exercise, couples counseling, making a big change… But sometimes, healing isn’t about a grand plan. It’s about small acts of care that quietly stack over time. It might look like letting yourself sleep without guilt, trusting your body’s need for rest. It might be walking outside just long enough to feel the sun on your face (not to “get steps in” or check a box, but because warmth reminds your nervous system that safety exists).
Healing can be in conversations where you allow silence instead of rushing to fill it. In the way you breathe deeper before answering an email that tightens your chest. In choosing to listen to your favorite song twice because today is hard.
It’s also in what you let go of; the pressure to be productive every moment, the habit of saying yes when your body screams no, the belief that healing has to be visible to be real.
And maybe healing is simply recognizing that you’re still here. Still waking up. Still trying. Still allowing yourself to believe that, with time, light can filter into even the darkest places. Remembering that one day you will find yourself alone on a bench in the sun, and you close your eyes and lean your head back and realize you’re okay.
So if you find yourself back where you thought you’d already been, remember:
You are not starting over. You are spiraling upward.
And that, too, is healing.
“Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.”
-keep shining
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