“Healing is not becoming someone new. It’s returning to who you were before the damage.” Opening Healing is often spoken about like it is soft. Like it is candles, silence, self-love playlists, and mornings that finally feel light again. But no one tells you the truth early enough— healing is not gentle in the beginning. It is disruption. It is remembering what you tried to forget without permission. There are days when healing does not feel like progress. It feels like losing your mind in smaller, quieter ways. It feels like standing in front of yourself and realizing you don’t recognize the person who survived what you went through. And still—you continue. Because somewhere underneath the exhaustion, you remember: you are not trying to become someone new. You are trying to return. Poem: “Return, Not Reinvention” I thought healing would be soft like morning light on clean skin But it was louder than that It came like broken glass in memory like names I stopped saying out loud I did not become new I became honest I met myself in fragments on days I could not lie anymore Some nights I spoke to my past self not to forgive her but to understand her silence I am not fixed I am being returned Piece by piece truth by truth And maybe that is what healing is not becoming better but becoming real again Context / Narrative Expansion Healing is not a transformation story the way people like to tell it. It is not a clean arc from broken to whole. It is a slow stripping away of survival versions of yourself— the version that smiled when it hurt, the version that stayed quiet to stay safe, the version that learned how to disappear in a room full of people. What remains after that stripping is not always beautiful. At first. Because what you find is not a polished identity. You find truth. And truth, when you have avoided it for long enough, feels like grief before it feels like freedom. You grieve who you had to become to survive. Then, slowly, something shifts. Not into perfection—but into return. You begin to recognize your own voice again. Not the voice shaped by fear, expectation, or pain—but the one that existed before all of it. Reflection / Closing Insight Healing is not glamorous. It does not always look like progress from the outside. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like starting over emotionally with no applause. Sometimes it looks like choosing honesty over being understood. But the real truth is this: You are not becoming someone new. You are removing everything that was never you. And what remains is not perfection. It is presence. "If this resonated share it with one person who needs it."
