Healing Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

There was a time when my mornings began with dread. I would open my eyes and feel anxiety rush in before I even had a chance to take a breath. My head was crowded with obsessive thoughts, always scanning for what could go wrong. I tried to think positively, but it always felt like I was secretly preparing myself for disaster. I was trapped in my own mind, too afraid to speak, too afraid to be seen, too afraid to take even the smallest risks.

That was my “normal.”

When I first heard the word healing, I thought it meant fixing everything all at once: finally being “happy,” or “cured,” or whatever picture-perfect version of life I thought I was supposed to live. But healing didn’t look like that for me; it looked a lot messier.

Healing, for me, meant slowing down enough to recognize my patterns, like the way I tied my worth to productivity, the way I confused rest with laziness, the way I let fear be the loudest voice in the room. It meant learning to rewrite the script in my head and choosing compassion instead of criticism. It meant befriending my ego instead of fighting it.

It meant becoming brave enough to use my voice, to put myself out there, to start posting on social media, to launch this blog, to record a podcast (even though part of me was terrified of being seen). Healing meant creating safety inside myself where there had never been any before.

But here’s the thing: my definition of healing isn’t yours. Healing is not one-size-fits-all, and that’s the very first step: defining it for yourself.

So I want to ask you what I once had to ask myself:

• What would healing look like in your daily life?

• If you woke up healed tomorrow, what would change first?

• What would you finally feel safe doing that you don’t feel safe doing now?

You don’t have to know the “how” yet; you just need to know the direction, because once you name where you’re headed, even the smallest step starts to feel like progress.

For me, healing meant breaking through the darkness and finally finding moments of happiness again. For you, it might mean something completely different. And that’s the beauty of it, healing is yours to define.