Am I Doing It? Am I Healing?

Are you healing or are you just coping better? I read the books and listened to the podcasts and watched the videos and still felt on edge. It was a nice distraction to have people talking about things that were interesting and new. I always loved listening to anything related to psychology, it was a way of getting to know how my mind works so I can explain what is going on around me. Perhaps it is interesting to most people to varying degrees. I read on substack that a lot of things you are doing is not actually self care it is simply self maintenance. I noticed I wasn’t healing, I was just learning to cope better. I had become so used to being in pain physically and mentally that nothing mattered anymore. One little stretch made me feel mystical. One extra glass of water was so incredibly needed I felt so free. 

Instead of binging on food and tv I was binging on other activities. I was still stressed out but with different coping skills. Some of the changes were great but most were just band aids on a bigger issue. I can’t really heal unless I am taken out of the environment that destroyed me and that became obvious when I cut out certain people from my life. I suddenly became so much healthier and I could think clearly and I regained strength in my body and my hair wasn’t falling out as much. My skin started to improve and my gut wasn’t in turmoil and I could eat gluten again. The thing is I wasn’t really healing at all, the healing would come later. I was simply starting to cope better because I wasn’t as stressed out. The stress had caused me to completely lose contact with my body despite the fact that I was living inside of it. 

My mind was completely disconnected and I was dissociated all the time because it felt safer than feeling these ginormous feelings. There lies the problem, in avoiding the feelings that were too big and scary I bypassed the entire thing with performance. I was claiming it was healing because everyone around me told me it was and I believed it. Then I started down the path of yoga and boy let me tell you whatever I was doing before was not healing, it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t even better coping just differently. I hadn’t done enough research and learned enough about history to truly understand what the hell was going on. Let me say this one thing, how could I be healing if I couldn’t sit still for 3 seconds without having an absolute breakdown?

The realization that no one is going to come save me and I have to save myself was a hard pill to swallow. Along with that and relatively low amount of support system it was difficult to imagine a life for myself where I would be doing so well I could consider myself healed. Reading about these topics and learning from other people’s stories is important but applying them into my life in real time and recognizing the themes in my life, recognizing the role I play, how economics and personal finance, personal physical and mental health, are all tangled together and sometimes you have no idea what is going on around you. This may not actually be the healing that I imagined but I had to start somewhere.