At The End Of This Journey, You’ll Be Healed

In the movies, when someone completely breaks down, it usually follows up with a montage of their healing process. Which almost always includes alcohol, tight dresses, a whole bunch of friends, and a whole lot of partying. For so long, that’s what I thought healing was supposed to look like, so whenever I was feeling lost, I would call up my closest friends and live it up. What I wasn’t expecting was to get home from an epic night out and still feel hopeless. I thought that whatever I was feeling would just go away, but that’s the horrible part about the process: It’s not like the movies.

The sad truth is that no amount of dancing, singing, or days spent with your friends will pull you out of the dark pit that you’re in. For me, it took me many months to finally figure that out, but once I did, I finally began to pull myself out of the pit.

I’m the type of person who chooses to distract myself from every thought wildly running through my head rather than deal with them. As much as it works for the moment, I quickly learned that it was only a temporary fix and that the distraction would only distract me in THAT single moment, because as soon as I got home, every feeling that I was trying to push to the back of my mind came at me full force.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that healing is not the poems you see on Instagram, it is not the 3 a.m. nights out, it is not the self-care routine you do on a Sunday morning, and it is nothing like the movies.

Healing is a continuous cycle of your mind running 1,000 miles an hour and you trying to slow it down. Healing is the nights when you are questioning if it’s even worth it. Healing is breaking down and crying in the middle of the day for no reason. Healing is finally dealing with your thoughts and emotions, even though it’s the last thing you want to do.

I hate to be the pessimist, but healing is anything but beautiful.

Just like everything else in life, thankfully, there is a balance. Although the process is painful, the outcome is quite beautiful.

Once you finally accept that you’re not okay, which is the first step in your journey, you can gracefully move on to the next step. In this step, you learn that it is okay to not be okay, and you do what you need to do. In my case, I cry and I cry and I cry until I physically cannot produce anymore tears. I call that step letting it out. As easy as it sounds, it is anything but. Letting it out can take as long as days or even months. But once you finally let it out, you can move on to the final step: Letting it go.

This step may be the hardest, because everything before this was already in you—it was just waiting to come out. But this step is a choice. You have to choose to let go whatever has such a strong hold on you. You have to choose to finally be happy. As much as I would love to help you with this part, it has to be your choice.

At the end of this journey, you will go out with your friends without the sole reason being to distract yourself. At the end of this journey, you will understand yourself in a more intimate way. At the end of this journey, you will have gotten yourself out of the pit, and you will have so much respect for yourself.

At the end of this journey, you will be healed.