I’m Not Healing “Correctly”; I’m Healing Honestly (But Not in the Way You Think)

There is a kind of loneliness that does not come from being alone. It comes from being with yourself, but no longer recognizing the voice inside. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Just quietly.

A little piece of you goes silent every time you ignore that gut feeling because someone else on the internet sounded more certain. Another disappears when you say “later” to your own needs again because there is always one more thing to do, one more child to comfort, one more responsibility waiting for you in the kitchen, your inbox, your business, your life.

And then one day you realize something uncomfortable: you have become very good at taking care of things. But when was the last time you actually listened to yourself?

That was me for a long time.

I thought healing meant becoming better. More peaceful. More evolved. More disciplined. More self-aware. More emotionally regulated. More healed. Always more.

So I treated myself like a constant improvement project. Fix this. Heal that. Optimize the rest.

And do not get me wrong, some of those tools genuinely helped me. Awareness matters. Reflection matters. Understanding yourself matters. But somewhere in the middle of trying to become a “better version” of myself, I slowly disconnected from the version already standing here. The human one. The tired one. The creative one. The overwhelmed one. The one quietly whispering, “I do not think we can keep living like this.”

I think that is why the intense craving from art / expression came knocking back into my life so intensely recently. Not as a strategy. As survival. One day I remember telling my husband, “I need art in my life.”

Not another productivity system. Not another course. Not another self-improvement practice I perform correctly while secretly feeling exhausted inside. Just art / expression. Something "unnecessary". Something alive. Something that existed outside usefulness.

And honestly, I do not think I realized how deeply I needed that until writing came back.

I used to write constantly when I was younger. Then adulthood happened. Responsibilities happened. Survival happened. And somewhere inside all that noise, I stopped. Then one day, as part of my own soul searching, I accidentally wrote a song. Not because I had a plan. Not because I wanted attention. Not because I suddenly decided to reinvent myself.

I wrote because something inside me had gone quiet for too long. And I think there is a difference between sacred silence and neglected silence. Sacred silence restores you. Neglected silence slowly erases you.

Lately, healing has not looked very aesthetic around here. It has looked like turning everything off early because my nervous system is done for the day. It has looked like incense burning in the background while I sit in silence trying to hear my own thoughts clearly again. It has looked like catching my overwhelm before I completely collapse inside it. Not because I mastered healing, but because I finally care enough about myself to notice.

It has looked like making things with my hands. Writing and dictating messy thoughts in notebooks or notes. Singing songs imperfectly. Letting creativity exist without forcing it to become productive immediately.

Sometimes I think we are starving creatively and calling it burnout. Not because we necessarily need another break, but because we need somewhere for ourselves to exist outside performance. Outside usefulness. Outside expectation. Maybe that is part of why so many people feel disconnected from themselves right now.

Everything has become optimization. Healing. Motherhood. Business. Relationships. Rest. Creativity. Spirituality. Everything becomes another thing to do "correctly". Meanwhile your nervous system is sitting in the corner begging you to slow down for five minutes. And I honestly think healing is not actually about becoming someone new. I think it is about hearing yourself clearly again underneath all the noise. Maybe it is remembering that your body is not a machine and your soul is not content. Maybe it is understanding that being spiritual does not mean becoming less human.

You can be deeply self-aware and still get overwhelmed. You can understand nervous systems and emotional regulation and still need silence. You can light candles, burn incense, talk about intuition, and still complain about the heat while eating snacks behind your booth listening to classic rock (and if you have been in the Farmers Market you probably know I'm talking about me ahahah)

That does not make your healing less real. That makes it honest. And, I trust honest people more these days. The ones who admit they are still figuring themselves out. The ones who are self-aware without pretending to be fully healed. The ones who understand that awareness is not perfection. Just presence..

So no, I do not think healing has made me “better.” I think it has made me more willing to hear myself. More willing to stop abandoning myself every time life gets loud. More willing to trust that maybe I was never broken in the first place.

Just buried underneath noise, expectations, performance, and survival. And maybe if you feel disconnected from yourself lately, you are not failing either. Maybe some part of you is simply waiting to be heard again.Not fixed.Heard. And honestly, I think that is weirdly sacred.