Healing Isn’t Linear

Most people think healing is a straight line. You go from hurt to healing. From lost to found. From pain to peace. Simple, right?

Except it’s not.

If you’ve ever tried to heal, you know this: one day, you feel okay—maybe even good. The next, you’re back in the same pain you thought you left behind. You start asking yourself: “Why am I feeling this again?” or “Didn’t I already deal with this?” And that’s when the doubt creeps in. “I thought I was better. I thought I was past this.”

But you’re not back at square one. You’re just in the middle of something deeper.

Healing doesn’t follow a timeline. It doesn’t care about how long it’s been or how hard you’ve worked. It’s not a one-and-done process. It’s a spiral—meaning you often revisit the same feelings, the same memories, and the same pain. But you revisit them from a new place, with more awareness than you had before.

Maybe this time, you’re not as scared. Maybe this time, you understand your reaction. Maybe this time, you know how to hold space for your feelings instead of trying to fix them. That’s growth. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.

The spiral of healing is frustrating, I know. It’s hard to feel like you’re moving forward when you keep circling back to the same wounds. But circling back doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re going deeper. You’re uncovering layers of pain that you were finally ready to face.

We don’t heal all at once. We heal in stages.
When you were younger, you might’ve buried your pain just to survive. Now that you’re safer, your body and mind are asking you to look at it again—not to punish you, but to help you process what you couldn’t back then.

This is the work of healing: revisiting, relearning, and rebuilding. Not in a straight line, but in a cycle that slowly brings you back to yourself.

And yes, it’s exhausting. Yes, it takes time.
But every time you return to the pain with more strength, more perspective, more self-compassion—that’s progress.

It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong if you're not “over it” yet.
It means you're human.

Real healing doesn’t look perfect. It looks like crying at random moments. Like feeling joy and guilt at the same time. Like being okay for a week, then unraveling on a random Tuesday. It’s not clean. It’s not pretty. But it’s real.

So the next time you feel like you’re spiraling, remember this:
You’re not going backwards.
You’re revisiting a part of you that’s ready to be healed in a new way.
You’re meeting yourself with more tools, more resilience, and more love than you had before.

That’s what healing actually is.
Not the absence of pain—
but the ability to move through it without losing yourself.

And you're doing that. Whether it’s obvious or not.

You’re not broken. You’re becoming.