What Does Healing Feel Like?
I think it’s safe to say that for the last 15 years, I’ve been searching for healing. There are a thousand directions I could go with this, so bear with me.
In my physical body
In 2009, my body became one I no longer knew. Symptom after symptom sprung up, sending me from doctor to doctor, test to test, and eventually hospital bed to hospital bed.
I was four weeks into a new job and suddenly I couldn’t keep down food or stay out of the bathroom. I remember trekking to work one brisk snowy winter morning from my apartment to the train and then to the office, and I’d lost so much of myself that I couldn’t ever get warm. I was wearing tights under my leggings, and sweat pants over them, using safety pins to keep my skirt up around my waist, and covering my top half with even more layers. I caught a glimpse of myself in a nearby office window reflection, and I noticed the slowly disappearing body that I was still trying to live inside.
Without detailing the entire journey, I’ll say this. The first real, true answer I got about my health was 6.5 years after that morning in the snow when I was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.
Today, another 8.5 years have passed, and the list of conditions I carry, medications I take, specialists I have on speed dial, and hospital frequent flyer miles I have collected is astounding. I’m what’s called “medically complex.” I’m a complicated patient, and many providers will not agree to take my case, despite the meticulous notes I keep, the records I carry and the health literacy I have gained.
Throughout this journey, I’ve done diligent research, reading, and reaching out; I’ve asked hundreds of questions and gotten second and third opinions with each new challenge that has arisen. But no matter what I have done, I have not been able to heal my body. I have not been able to reduce the chronic pain I live in, the excessive medications I rely on, or the mental load of carrying it all.
I just… keep trying to survive, despite the continual obstacles.
That mental load though - it’s tried to take me out more than a few times now.
With my mental health
During the aforementioned 15 years, I’ve seen several therapists, completed two different psychiatric outpatient programs nearly a decade apart, and I’ve experienced more of a battle with depression, anxiety, and PTSD than I could’ve ever seen coming. There have been endless months of seeing my therapist twice a week and my psychiatrist once a week, changing medications like I change clothes, praying to an invisible force that something would turn the light back on in the darkest room I’d ever stood in. I thought I’d been doing the work, the talking and the processing and the integrating, but took an essential undoing (also known as a complete and total emotional breakdown) to land me in the right place at the right time.
I recently shared some more about receiving IV Ketamine Infusions - which when I first started not only did I feel was an absolute last resort, but I was also skeptical and totally terrified of the pending treatment option.
I knew that I desperately needed help healing my mind and nurturing my heart, but I had no idea if that was a place I could even put down tracks of hope to hold onto.
Today, I read this quote that stopped me completely:
“Healing is not becoming the best version of yourself. Healing is letting the worst version of yourself be loved.” - - Kobe Campbell, LCMHC
My first thought was “I wish I knew what that means for me.”
My next thought was “I still feel like I’m pretty far away from what I would consider the best version of myself. I think the last time I could identify her I was 21 years old, full of life and vigor, always able to pour into other people’s cups, always able to say yes, always willing to go along for the ride, share the adventure, be brave and strategic and smart. There’s so much I want to say to that girl, and it’ll come… in time.”
But tonight I started wondering what I’d consider the worst version of myself to be.
And honestly, I think that title, that version, it’s been collecting ammunition over time. Moments and aches and anchors and survival patterns from the time I was a little girl through losses and lessons and hurt and pain; from not being seen or heard or listened to through being misused, misguided, manipulated and hurt, by the time I reached college graduation it’s a miracle I was still on the straight and narrow.
Tonight, defining the “worst version” of myself means the most heartbroken, grief stricken, emotionally destroyed, numb, disassociated version of me who’s body would spend hours in rooms without her mind, who lived in what felt like a sinkhole of grief, and had no strength to pull herself out.
There were too many things to count that damaged my heart before I became a mother, but losing babies became a very clear milestone between the before and the after. And in the after, the heartbreak doesn’t ever leave, it doesn’t fade, it just moves, at a glacial pace, in a direction that vaguely looks like it’s getting further away but I can never be too sure.
The worst version of me is the one that has been injured and ill, who has lost her autonomy and her will to live more than once in the last few years alone, and yet somehow, still stands before you today. The worst version of myself dragged her limp body and her emotionless face into the first few weeks of Ketamine treatments wondering if there was even a point to it all.
I’ll be honest. Tonight it feels hard to feel compassion and love for that girl. I feel devastated for her. I feel so much hurt on her behalf. Occasionally, but much more sporadically than ever before, I can still feel the intensity of the awful that she has felt so many times.
But I will also consider myself one of the lucky ones. There are friends who have stood on the sidelines, sending middle of the night texts and hugs in a box and unintelligible phone calls made out of desperation and sobbing - and I feel like the truth is they did love that girl. The worst version of myself. They loved her when I couldn’t. They loved her when I wouldn’t. And now, they still love her when I forget that I’m still trying to learn how to give her grace.
I guess thats the truth. I don’t have all of the tools or resources I need to heal my body, even with my shiny new cadaver parts, but I do have a great deal of resources to help continuing to heal my heart.
I think that’s what healing means - taking one step, one tiny step, whenever your able, away from the hurt and toward the hope - even if it’s hope that someone else is carrying for you. You don’t have to be ready to hold onto the hope - in truth, I haven’t gotten there yet. But I have a pretty special friend who reminds me all of the time that she will hold it until I’m ready to take it on myself. She will hold it while I start to gain comfort with it. She won’t just drop it in my lap and bolt. And that - that feels like I’m walking in the right direction. The one towards healing. The one that continues to let her see the worst of me, and believes that maybe one day, she’ll get to see the new best version of me too. But I also know that won’t be why she stayed. She stayed because I am trying. Because I have tried. Because I’m going to keep trying.
Nobody can heal for you, but they sure as shit can walk beside you or stand next to you or text you a heart when there aren’t any words.
Have you thought about the best version of yourself?
What about the worst version?
How are they different?
Have they ever been one in the same?