Rambling Flower

Healing made me sadder than anything I was healing from.

I wasn’t expecting that.

I think social media made me believe it’s all sunshine and rainbows. The influencers with their slow mornings, gratitude practices, sound baths, and always-calm energy. They made healing look like a beautiful process of becoming, a journey where you put yourself first. I thought that’s what I was signing up for.

And at the beginning, it did feel like that. I learned the vocabulary too; boundaries, letting go of my superwoman persona, filling my own cup. I went on walks, practiced gratitude, meditated.

There was real relief in it…in slowing down, in naming things, in feeling like I was finally doing something right for myself. The load I’d been hauling through life became lighter.

I remember thinking, wow, this is what healing feels like. Feels nice!

I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

Healing is a long journey. The kind with mountains you don’t see coming, stretches of rough road that go farther than you planned, and weather that changes without warning. And in that journey, you’re walking with a backpack on. Stuffed with everything you’ve lived through, versions of yourself you’ve outgrown, and old wounds you forgot were still in there.

At first, the backpack feels lighter. Like healing is slowly unpacking it for you. But then, the further I walked, the heavier it became. I started finding things at the bottom of the bag that had always been there. Things I didn’t know I was carrying.

Nobody told me healing could bring me to my knees like this. That underneath all the busyness and the pushing through, there were so many emotions waiting for me. The loneliness, the grief, the sadness I’d spent years outrunning. They didn’t go away when I buried myself in work or responsibilities. They just waited for me to slow down.

On some days, I catch myself thinking that ignorance is truly bliss. I wish I could go back to not knowing and caring about healing. This self-awareness feels like a curse sometimes.

Because once I started seeing clearly, I didn’t just see what was done to me. I started seeing what I did, too.

And that part hit me harder.

I wasn’t always a considerate person. I didn’t see my selfishness at the time. I was too caught up in my own world to really show up for the people around me. I thought I was being a decent person.

But healing showed me things as they actually are, not as I needed them to be. And I couldn’t unsee what I saw. The conversations I handled poorly, the people I dismissed and hurt. The moments someone needed me, and I just wasn’t there.

The guilt swallows me whole. The “I should have known better” won’t leave me alone. Even when I know that at the time, I genuinely didn’t.

The journey showed me the other side of it, too. The moments I was hurt. The times I was taken advantage of, made to feel small, or not quite worth the effort. There’s a sadness not just in what happened, but in finally realizing I didn’t recognize it for what it was. That I stayed in spaces I shouldn’t have entered in the first place. That I kept looking for love and validation in places that were never going to give it to me.

I understand now that those weren’t moments of weakness. They were wounds I’d been carrying for a long time…this deep need to just be seen, without having to earn it. And because that need was never really met, I went looking for it everywhere. Sometimes in the wrong people. Sometimes in the wrong rooms.

Somewhere along this journey, I met her…the younger version of me. The one who was just trying to survive everything she was handed, with none of what she actually needed to make sense of it.

When I really looked at her, I felt a grief I wasn’t expecting.

She was so young. So overwhelmed. Most of what she did came from fear, from not knowing better, from just trying to make it through the day. I wished I could have reached her earlier. That I had dealt with things with more mature eyes, back when it could have still changed something.

I wonder sometimes who I would have been if things had been different. Maybe less anxious, less guarded. Maybe I wouldn’t have spent so many years trying to prove my worth by overextending myself. Maybe I would have known earlier that my needs mattered too.

Something else I noticed along the way is that the circle is getting smaller. At first, it felt like a loss. But the longer I walked, the more I understood it differently. Some of it is a consequence. I didn’t know how to nurture relationships back then, and I didn’t show up the way people needed me to.

But some of it is just the nature of healing. Some paths you’re meant to walk with fewer people, or just yourself. Some won’t understand the person you’re becoming. It’s no one’s fault; it’s just how life is.

I still feel the heaviness of it all. The relationships I didn’t know how to keep. The people I hurt without meaning to. The spaces I entered that slowly chipped away at me because I didn’t think I deserved better.

I’m still trying to make peace with all of it. That’s the grief nobody really prepares you for. The grief of hindsight. Of looking back at yourself and seeing all the moments you were lost, absent, hurting others, and being hurt. And wishing, so badly, that you had known better then. That you can travel back to that time and do things differently.

I think that’s why healing looks like sadness from the outside.

Because in a lot of ways, it is. It’s mourning the versions of yourself that didn’t have enough awareness, enough maturity, enough softness. It’s apologizing to yourself in silence over and over. It’s apologizing to others, sometimes in your head, sometimes in letters you’ll never send.

It’s realizing that some wounds don’t make you stronger. They just made you…tired. And I’m exhausted, grieving and lonely.

I won’t give up though. I never will.

So I keep walking.