A Healing Year

*based on a real 2024 journal entry

Acceptance is my way forward. I am finally moving. I do not have to wait for them to change. For them to come along with me. I might be waiting forever. I won’t wait forever. It all holds new meaning under different light. For the first time in decades, I am quieted. I settle into my body. I feel stillness, assurance. I see the path before me, bare in its blooming truth: grief and uncertainty are ahead; peace, wholeness, and love are, too. Pain does not cause me to turn back. I know the way to the other side – the way out is through. I am grounded, solid. My recovering intuition knows it is time to move.

It happened the same day my loving friend told me something no one had told me before. It woke me from a slumber I did not know I was stuck in. Your people can surprise you like that: offering what you did not know you needed. People in your corner, who know you, they often see what you cannot. My dear friend knew me in ways I am still learning to know myself. Their truth-telling grabbed me firmly by the shoulders and silenced voices that had embedded loudly in my memory and my mind for a lifetime. Their brave love for me took action, captivated my attention, and pointed me in a new direction. To lovingly shake me awake, all it took was a few words: “I don’t like how they treat you.”

Over a decade into beginning true healing work, I was still learning my needs. There was so much noise in the way of me knowing my own self and being able to act on that knowledge. Much of it is by design. Much of it imposed. And, for me, much of it results from a childhood overflowing with layered trauma. Kelley Harrell said, “We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.” and while individual healing work is one part, relationships are where you put it into practice. Relationships are where you learn and experience healing from the harmful disconnections of the past – yours and the generations before you. My friend catapulted me into an awareness I assumed I had already grasped: I do not have to wait on others; I do not have to save them; I can give myself permission, now. I knew this in my head as we do so many concepts. I knew from talk therapy. From reading and book-learning. From thinking and processing. I knew it from intellectualizing. I did not yet know in my bones. In my muscles, sinew, and nerve endings. In my inner child, my inner teen, and my gut. In many ways, I was still rooted in the old places. Despite the new information, I continued to struggle with the chains of old patterns; with the death grip of stories they still tell about me, and the ones I’d been speaking to myself. I desperately needed a way to move my learning into action and choices. I needed a way across to the new place. My friend offered a bridge.

It goes something like this: It is not all my fault. I do not have to earn love with “good behaviour”. I am not responsible for what they think of me. I am not to blame when others treat me poorly. I am not responsible for their feelings. So many untrue narratives have been taught to me, spoken to me, internalized by me. And it kept me captive to trying so hard as a way of being. I tried to be liked. I tried to be what they expected. I tried to appease conditional relationships with people who do not know how to love me. I tried to be accepted by those who reject my humanity, offer me crumbs, and expect my ongoing efforts. I chased those who flee or sneer at me over their shoulder when I dare express a need, tell them No, or share my experiences. They are mired in their own quicksand, but I have been gradually freeing myself for decades. They can no longer pull me under with them.

I get to be a whole person beyond narratives, characterizations, and mistreatment. I get to have people who see me. I get to have people who love me for who I am, not for what I do for them or for how they can use me to assuage their pain. I get to have people who know how to sit with discomfort and take responsibility; who are approachable and open to being accountable. None of us deserves being demonized, pathologized, and harmfully labelled. I don’t deserve it, either. I am allowed to exist outside of created societal “norms”. I am allowed to be my full self. Since I am a person – flawed like every other human on this planet to ever exist – I am allowed to be imperfect and make mistakes. This does not mean no consequences, no accountability, no working through an issue (a necessary clarification in the face of regularly weaponized “No one is perfect” used to avoid repairing harms.) What being allowed to makes mistakes really means is we are not insulted, demeaned, and punished for our missteps. It means we are held to account with love and acceptance, not domination and corrupted power. It means I do not have to earn respect but am deserving right now, as I am. I am inherently loveable. I am inherently valuable. I am inherently good, even while I am capable of harm and toxicity, because we all are.

So, I will take space to grieve and feel pain, betrayal, and all the difficult emotions in my body. I will move away from those who operate in lies and destruction. I do not need to prove myself to those who refuse to see. I am done trying so hard to be loved by these people. I am ready to care for myself in ways that let me be human, and feel and stay in my body. In ways that let me join the work of liberating us all. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” -Audre Lorde. My people and my communities need me as well as I can be. Old wounds and old stories will no longer keep me from the work of wholeness. That which does not align with my values will not be prioritized. Relationships – whether born into, years-long, or previously held close – must grow and evolve. It is time to let go. It is time to move in a new way.

And she did.