Adventures of the Traveling Grief Case

Healing doesn’t mean it disappears.

Healing doesn’t mean you ignore something and it goes away.
It doesn’t mean you stay busy, smile more, function better, or decide you’re “over it.”

What isn’t felt doesn’t disappear — it gets stored.
In the body.
In the nervous system.
In patterns that repeat until something finally changes.

This is why I write.

I don’t write to relive the past.
I write to get things out of my body.

Even if no one ever reads it.
Even if nothing comes of it.

Writing is how I process.
It’s how I understand myself.
It’s how experiences move instead of staying stuck inside me.

Healing isn’t always about reminiscing.

Sometimes it’s revisiting memories from a completely different place and time — after you’ve grown, after you’ve changed — so you can finally see them clearly.

Sometimes that takes longer than we want it to.
Sometimes it takes years.
Especially when something affected your body, your sense of safety, or your nervous system.

Trauma doesn’t leave because you avoid it.
It doesn’t change because you keep going.
It stays until you’re willing to sit with it.

Healing requires presence.

It requires sitting alone with what hurts instead of pushing past it.

Letting yourself feel it —
the sadness,
the anger,
the grief,
the confusion —
all the way through.

Sometimes healing looks like sitting in a dark room and letting it be there.
Crying with it.
Getting angry at it.
Letting it say what it never got to say.

Not to stay stuck —
but to let it finish.

What we avoid doesn’t soften.
What we feel, slowly does.

Healing doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t hurt.
And it doesn’t mean blaming people forever either.

Forgiveness isn’t for the other person.
It’s for your body.

Because holding anger, resentment, and unfinished pain keeps you carrying something you don’t need anymore.
And when we stay stuck in blame alone, nothing actually moves.

When you’re able to look honestly at what a relationship gave you at the time —
what need it filled,
who you were then —
something shifts.

Patterns loosen.
You stop attracting the same wounds in different forms.

You don’t change by avoiding what happened.
You change by facing it.

And at some point, you notice your body respond differently.

There used to be a feeling —
the butterflies,
the charge,
the rush when someone said something kind, or familiar, or loaded with meaning.

And then one day, the same words land and… nothing happens.

No flutter.
No drop.
No tightening.
Just quiet.

That’s not numbness.
That’s your nervous system no longer being recruited.

The memory still exists, but the body no longer treats it as present danger or promise.
The meaning has changed.
The pattern has loosened.
What once activated you no longer has leverage.

This is how you know something has moved through you.

Healing doesn’t always feel like relief.
Sometimes it feels like neutrality.
Like clarity.
Like the absence of charge where there used to be a storm.

You didn’t shut down.
You didn’t harden.
You didn’t lose your capacity to feel.

You stopped confusing activation with connection.

Healing isn’t pretty.
It isn’t linear.
And it isn’t passive.

It asks you to go in.
To feel it all the way through.
To let it transform instead of burying it.

That quiet at the end?
That’s the body exhaling.

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Take a breath and feel your body right now.
If it feels settled — even just a little — that’s how you know this is true.

If this mirrors something you’re moving through, you’re not alone. You’re welcome to share your experience in the comments if it feels supportive.

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