This Is How You'll Know You're Healing 🌸
'Everyone’s healing journey looks different, and because of that, you won’t always recognize when it’s happening.'
Welcome to the Collective World X Thought Catalog Newsletter. Collective World is a one-of-a-kind creative network powered by the minds and voices behind The Thought & Expression Company. We’re so glad you’re here.
How do you know when you’re healing? Truthfully, sometimes you just don’t.
Sometimes healing isn’t obvious. Sometimes it sneaks up on us without us ever knowing, and we don’t realize it until one day we don’t respond to triggers the same way we once did.
Sometimes we don’t realize we’re healing because it doesn’t feel the way we think it should. Healing isn’t about never feeling the sting of pain again. It’s not about forgetting everything that hurt you. It’s not about feeling invincible. You won’t always feel the peacefulness you’d expect. Sometimes healing is just moving forward, even when it feels easier to take a step backwards.
Sometimes we don’t realize we’re healing because we don’t fully notice our own progress. When you take life day to day, it’s hard to see the way we steadily inch forward. It’s easier to notice the relapses, the trip ups, the moments where we don’t feel like we’re as far along as we should be. It’s much harder to step back and see your whole journey, especially when it’s a slow change over time. You don’t see the way you’ve changed in a year, or five, or even ten.
Sometimes we don’t realize we’re healing because we just forget to keep noticing it. Healing isn’t some big revelation, and while it’s a transformative process, you’ll rarely feel like a brand new person. Sometimes healing blends in with the flow of life, and it’s not until later that you realize you reached the small milestones without even noticing it.
The truth is, sometimes we don’t realize we’re healing because we don’t always completely understand what that means. As Bianca Sparacino so beautifully put it, “We are all healing from things we may not understand, things that feel unfair, and haunted, and gritty within our bones. We are all healing — and there is no right or wrong way to approach that journey, because healing is not linear, it does not exist within a structured or sensible timeline.”
But I will say this: There will always be small moments that tip us off to this progress. Like when we choose to keep putting in the work, even when it’s hard, even when it feels much easier to quit. Like when, instead of falling back on old coping mechanisms, we find healthy ways to deal with our emotions. Like when we fight against our impulses to self-destruct or beat ourselves up and instead try to extend ourselves true compassion.
Everyone’s healing journey looks different, and because of that, you won’t always recognize when it’s happening. And it’s okay if you don’t know which way this journey will take you. It’s okay if you don’t know what healing is supposed to look like on you. All you can do is do your best. As Chelsey Armfield wrote, “All you can do is take each step as it comes and wander down each new path as it presents itself to you.”
What We’re Reading This Week 📖💛
“In the mirror, I am myself and something else—a shadow, a memory, a leaf on a branch of a hundred-foot tree.” — Callie Byrnes
“Why should this person be at the story’s heart? And whose voice has been lost in order to elevate it?” — Sarah Manavis
“i’m learning to long for things that are simple” — Natalia Vela
“Though the monsters of literature are sometimes beholden, even prisoner, to their own idiosyncratic rules, they are—or at any rate, they seem to be—utterly free of the manners and mores that keep the rest of us locked within limits.” — Jess Zimmerman
“If it means that much, if it is that central to everything that matters to you, it is worth doing regardless of the outcome, right?” — Melissa Febos
For more reading recommendations follow Quote Catalog where we find and file the best things to read every single day.
Let us leave you with this:
“You’ll know you’ve healed
when you find gratitude
in the pain
that once broke you” — Taj Arora
Trust that you’ll get there 🤍
Thank for your beautiful, reading on healing ' ..appreciate it muchly " ...🙂👍🙏❤