Teona Studemire

Healing feels like a long ride.

I can see my destination in the distance but it feels just out of reach. I keep having to make detours or pit stops as I run out of gas or new issues with my vehicle pops up. Sometimes I pick up a new passenger who wants to join me on the ride and we share our stories and our thoughts and even though we aren’t on the same exact journey, theirs runs parallel to my own.

Sometimes I’m dropping them off as our paths diverge and I watch their backs as they disappear into the distance. On occasion they pop back in to ride along with me for a bit before they have to continue in another direction. Other times I’m kicking them out of my car because I realize they can’t stay on this journey with me.

I don’t imagine some grand epiphany to hit randomly where clouds part and a beam of sunlight shines down on me during a stormy day. Rather it’s a passing realization, like reflecting on a conflict and knowing that if the past you had faced it, they wouldn’t have handled it as well as the present version of yourself. It’s something you don’t even realize is happening, like a background process that’s constantly running but rarely ever obvious. Healing is stopping to think about how I want to respond and the effects that response will have. What do I want to accomplish? What do I want to communicate? Do I even need to respond? So much internal work is being done and though I don’t always do this actively, I know I’m healing when it happens more frequently. Healing is also forgiving myself for all the things I couldn’t control, all the information I didn’t have before making decisions, for not being able to discern the difference between my anxiety and my intuition. Forgiving myself for the pain I suffered through because I couldn’t, wouldn’t, and didn’t communicate my pain or remove myself from it. It’s giving myself more room and more grace when before I’d be too hard on myself.

When I was younger, healing was always portrayed as this goal you can achieve and finally be done with. There would apparently come a day where I’d be fully healed from whatever trauma or misguided teachings I’d developed under and I’d be able to step into a new day as a fully healed person. That’s far from the case. As much as we can strive for perfection, it isn’t possible. If we’re always going to grow but never able to achieve ultimate growth, then in the same vein, we will always be healing but never able to see what fully healed looks like for us. Everyday we live is not only a new day to heal and grow, but it's also a new day to take steps back and have things happen that we need to heal from. As human beings, each day is an experience in and of itself. The goal is to just keep getting better at doing right by yourself and others. I imagine that healing just makes the journey a bit sweeter.