i think i had a wrong idea about what healing would feel like. i thought it would be linear. i thought there would be a before version and an after version and a clear moment of transition. i thought one day i would simply be done. healed. fixed. ready.
what it actually looks like, from the inside, is messier and stranger and more ongoing than any of that. some days i am so far from where i started that i barely recognise the person who used to make those choices. and some days, something small happens — a tone of voice, a particular kind of silence, a situation that rhymes with an old one — and i am briefly, completely back in a version of myself i thought i'd left behind.
the difference now is i know the way out. i know it's temporary. i know that being back there for a moment doesn't mean i live there anymore. that knowledge is the whole thing. that's what the work actually builds — not a version of you that never gets triggered, but a version of you that knows how to come home to yourself when it happens.
@diverse_.writes