Healing: Destination or a Stop Along the Way?
June 1st, 2021 | Valeria Roglinova
Illustration by Valeria Roglinova
There is no such thing as healing yourself. In fact, there is no such thing as being healed at all, ever. And although this may sound a little bit patronising and possibly depressing, it opens the doors to a perspective that is void of the pre-conceived westernised garbage that we can or need to heal from any experience that we’ve had.
It took me many years to realise this, but the entire concept of healing is actually just another way to say that we can get “sick” - or broken as we usually describe it. The very idea of having to heal from something puts you in a position that makes you ashamed, angry or anxious when you are going through the same mental breakdown about the same thing that haunted you three, five or ten years ago. Ultimately, realising that you never did heal after all, you never managed to “just let it go” and “move on to become stronger”. You end up feeling guilty for experiencing the pain you told all of your friends and family that you’re “over it now”. You convinced yourself that once the healing has happened, once you step back up on your feet again, once you’ve gotten yourself out of the rut and finally believed that there’s more beauty in this world than suffering, then your work with that particular event, situation or lingering childhood trauma has evaporated. That there is no more work to be done and in fact, you are an enlightened, self-sufficient individual that is so brave and strong to have healed.
And there is beauty in this ideology. Because it helps us place responsibility on the process of healing rather than on admitting the pain. What we fail to acknowledge is that healing doesn’t exist at all. There is a whole lot of a process and steps we take, all the more different and difficult from the last one, but our final goal was never meant to be “healed”. We confuse the journey we take towards experiencing and recognizing our pain caused by a particular event, with the notion of getting to a place where we don’t feel any pain about it anymore. And I find that dreadful.
We have been convinced that pain is something which requires extermination, destruction and refusal of a whole colourful plethora of emotions that come with it. As in the gravest pain we find the most gratitude. In the hardest moments to love ourselves, we find the greatest compassion. In the sleepless nights we find inspiration. And there are also moments when there is just pain, and we can’t see the end of it, we can’t twist it around into something positive. And yet none of that should ever be rejected or attempted to destroy. It never will be destroyed regardless. What may happen instead, in the long road to your healing, is to completely forget that pain. Yet, to never stop feeling it, falling gracefully into suffering. As suffering isn’t pain. Suffering is the refusal of understanding the pain. And it is far worse.
The soul rejoices at every experience, even the ones that may completely shatter us. All the soul wants is to live on. All the soul wants is to learn. And this is where pain transforms into our teacher, our mentor and our biggest source of self-actualisation. Yet, that is still not healing. Because we’re not healing - we’re learning and we’re living. We are listening, recognising and accepting, and we know the pain is there.
We should stop telling each other that we need to heal or that we’ve healed. The pain will never disappear, the pain will always be there and we will always carry it. The heart remembers. And if we don’t allow it to come pouring down on us on a random Thursday during a walk in the park, years after that pain first occurred, then we aren’t killing it - we’re just rejecting it from speaking to us. I wish to live a life where I don’t have to ever again be ashamed of the fact that I feel like I’m back to square one. I wish no one ever told me or taught me that I can heal my heart, rather than to simply listen to it.
Because we do not heal but we learn. We learn to process the pain differently. We learn to refuse to suffer any longer because we’ve spent years rejecting understanding it. We learn to react and respond in ways that help us fully and freely express that pain but never hurt anyone, including ourselves. We learn that we can do more, we can do better, we can plant seeds of kindness and gratitude at every corner of our short walk on this Earth. And we learn that we will never heal because we never had to nor could heal. Because that pain, thankfully, will stay there as a patient and vigilant reminder of the things that make us happy.