Healing didn’t knock,
It barged in with a knife
Choose: bleed or stitch
And like most of us
I chose Instagram/TikTok to search the wound itself
Isn’t that growth?
The healing and the recovery arc. The part you think is going to feel like a sunrise but mostly feels like being stuck in the rain with no idea how to drive home.
Are we ready?
Here’s how to heal step by step:
Step 1 – Record yourself crying.
Step 2 – Light a candle. Preferably lavender or a ‘trauma release blend’.
Step 3 – Meditate for five minutes. Bonus points if you cry a little (don’t forget to to record this beautiful experience).
Step 4 – Take a photo of your journal entry, just enough blur to look artsy, but make sure the word healing is still legible.
Step 5 – Eat something green. It doesn’t matter what. Just green.
Step 6 – Post all the above on social media.
Step 7 – Caption it: ‘doing the work’ or ‘in my healing era’.
Step 8 – Now wait for someone to comment, ‘You’re glowing’.
There you go. That’s how you heal.
Do you really think I could someday become a bestselling author if I just told you to do that? Then again… maybe. Look at half the influencers on your feed. Apparently, all it takes to be a guru now is a neutral colour palette and a tragic backstory. But unfortunately for you, I didn’t write this article to sell you calmness. I wrote it to tell you the truth.
I wish healing looked like a reel of someone in a silk robe, morning light slanting across their face, as if God personally approved their trauma. There’s matcha and journaling. But it isn’t. You think a voiceover: “Healing isn’t linear”—right before they promote a $72 moonstone that allegedly cures abandonment issues (it doesn’t. Trust me. I checked), will fix you? I’m not judging. Okay, I am. But only a little. Because this version of healing is seductive.
Can someone explain me when the fuck did healing stop being a process and turned into a carefully curated performance? You don’t heal because your space is minimal. You heal because you sat in the mess long enough to learn your own name again. And listen, I’m not knocking comfort. Do what you need to feel sane. But repackaging avoidance, turning trauma into a colour palette and selling survivorship like it’s skincare will not lead you to self-discovery. We’ve turned healing into an aesthetic because the truth can’t be uploaded. How can you feel proud of yourself for surviving when social media taught you it only counts if you’re glowing while you do it?
What social media misses out on is that healing is violent. It can be choosing not to forgive and staying broken for a bit on purpose—because the cracks aren’t ready to be fixed. Maybe they’re just where the light gets in and where the scream gets out. It’s the burning of certainty and not sage. We’ve been taught to romanticise our survival and monetise our breakdowns. And that’s the real damage: we’ve stopped allowing pain to be private.
Psychologist Dr. Thema Bryant says, “You can’t heal what you won’t name.” And I’d add – you also can’t heal while curating the experience for an audience. You don’t heal through anything by making pain digestible for people around you or for yourself. You don’t heal by sanding down your pain into something inspirational. How long will you keep telling yourself it happened for a reason when what you really mean is, I need it to mean something so I can survive it.
So, how do you do it if there is no 30-day inner child challenge that makes your body forget how betrayal felt? Yes, I know you want a clean answer. You want a ‘do this and you’ll feel better’. Regrettably, trauma doesn’t come with a refund policy or a manual, and you can’t rise like a phoenix. You must start by dragging yourself forward, even if you are limping. Start by integrating your traumas and problems rather than trying to overcome them. Coexisting with the ugly will help you carry the weight without letting it drown you. You will see changes when you stop avoiding your issues and instead of moving on from it, you move with it.
You name things. Remember, “you cannot heal what you will not name”? So, name the hurt. The betrayal. The moment they left. The dream that collapsed. The version of you that died in that room. You don’t have to write it in cursive on pretty paper. Just say it out loud anywhere you want to. Then you rest. Yes, rest. Not a sleep-for-twelve-hours kind of rest (although it’s okay to go off). I mean emotional rest when you stop trying to fix yourself in a single weekend, where you stop treating your pain like a productivity project.
Healing is deleting their number and not rewriting it from memory. It’s unfollowing them without announcing it. It’s saying, “I miss you,” and then not texting them. It’s learning to grieve someone who is still alive and posting thirst traps. It’s brushing your teeth when you feel disgusting, or even eating something with protein, even though your heart tells you you’re not hungry. It’s letting yourself laugh at something stupid. It’s going to therapy and admitting that sometimes you’re scared to feel better because misery feels like home. You don’t heal by chasing closure from someone who doesn’t even recycle. You move forward by giving yourself the kindness people withheld. You start feeling better when you let time do its slow, quiet work. By stacking small, boring choices on top of each other until one day you realise: Oh. I didn’t cry today.
I used to think healing would be an arrival or a finish line. Now I know it’s just learning to carry what broke you without becoming it. You don’t wake up healed. You just wake up tired one day and realise you’re a little less angry than you were yesterday and maybe a little less ashamed. You laugh at something dumb and realise it’s the first real laugh in weeks. That’s healing, too. The moment no one claps for. And eventually your body forgets the urgency. The memory stops ambushing your mornings.
Refuse to stay broken, and that would be the start of you.
