I wrote this in January of 2018. It was in my draft box. The beauty of quarantine life… you give yourself space and time to check the draft box! Hope it blesses you.

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Healing is a process. We can become our own worst enemy when we do not allow ourselves the space to heal. I am not talking about the type of healing that disposes illness from our bodies. I am talking about the acknowledgement that even physical illness requires more than physical healing.

When you have been hurt, it’s easy to say “if the person who hurt me would apologize, I would be whole.” The reality may be that forgiving yourself and releasing your from guilt or sorrow may be bigger than hearing words from a perpetrator.

What if our pain came from someone without the capacity to verbalize or act out that they were/are sorry? So, the question I am posing is, “what do I need to do to heal?” There are no winning set of steps. It’s not easy.

A woman who survived incest described the process of healing as the “act of cleaning up a polluted river because you remember when the river was full of life.” What a task worth taking. To restore life to places where life used to be. It takes getting your hands dirty. It takes help from others. It takes planning for the future.   It takes the strength to imagine when you can’t see the possibility. It takes so much. And we all have it in us. To heal.