What healing means to me

{cw: Violence mentioned}

Someone asked me on my Ask Me Anything - talk to me Tuesday IG story what healing means to me. Such a good question, and it made me pause. I guess I haven’t spent too much time thinking about what it means to me. 

Healing is something I think about everyday. Sometimes too much, really. I am always striving to heal. I need to remember that it’s okay not to ALWAYS be healing. 

It means “to make whole”. 

Wholeness will look different for us all. For me, being whole includes living with tremendous loss. There’s just no way around it. It will never be ‘healed’ in a way that will make it less, or gone for that matter. And I wouldn’t want it to be gone. 

After my mom died when I was 18, I thought there would come a day when I would need her less, or miss her less, a day when I was ‘healed.’ Well, I’ve learned that that’s not what healing is.  At least not for me. 

Healing means to be free. 

To be free from my past which has held me back for so long. Not having repaired my relationship with my mom before she died, leaving her that night that I ran out of the room after we had both been stabbed, all my black out years and the way I failed myself. 2 failed marriages, quitting my career, making choices people didn’t understand. 

I have put in the work just to be alive. 

I have put in the work to be more free from my past, knowing it’s always a work in progress. 

Healing my relationship with my body and my eating disorders. 

The way I’ve done it is just to keep showing up each day. Keep trying and learning and growing, even when I didn’t want to. Get through it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. 

Learning to love again. Learning to be myself. Finding my way back to myself. 

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