Healing Hurts

Seems like a negative way to start off a series on healing, but let’s face it, it’s true.

Healing is not pretty. You can dress it up as a beautiful, transformative experience, which to be fair, it is, but that transformation is going to break you more, before it starts to put the pieces back together.

You’re going to be a grubby caterpillar before you soar as the rockstar butterfly you are.

Healing looks different for everyone. Whether you are healing from the loss of a loved one or recovering from an illness, or in my case a combination of those and other things, everyone is going to go through the process in their own way.

The first step, just as with most painful things in life, is acceptance. Accept that you need to heal and allow yourself to let in the people, places, and things that are going to aid you on your journey, because I should also mention, as much as you want to try and do this alone, you can’t.

Let me say that again for the folks in the back, YOU CANNOT DO THIS ALONE.

My healing journey started with a whole lot of terrible things, and a few things I thought were great, but actually weren’t.

J.K. Rowling once famously said, “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” Then she wrote Harry Potter. Now, is my Harry Potter about to emerge? I’m not sure, but I do know I started my story at the same place. Rock bottom.

Sick. Overweight. Broke. Depressed. Lost.

I was all of these and more, but I didn’t understand how it was all connected.

My story of healing is still in progress. It is not a linear path that has a finite end point, it just is.

The things I’m going to share in this series are not always going to paint me in the best light, in fact, most of it is me at my worst. But that’s ok.

The point of me doing this is not to show how great I am, but rather how great God is and how great you can be when you stop letting fear take control of you.

My need to heal was prompted by a series of events that started with my Dad’s death in 2019, but ultimately, it is rooted in how I had lived my life up until that point.

It is truly a miracle I am alive still and I have someone much bigger than all of this to thank for that. I know I am alive so that I can keep fighting and so that in some way my story, my battles, my losses, my victories, and my grief will help some of you with yours.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel y’all. It may not look the way you pictured it, but I promise, it will be more than you could have ever imagined.