There’s a version of healing that looks good on camera. Then there’s the real thing.
For a long time, I confused the two. I thought healing meant arriving somewhere: a calmer, more evolved version of myself who had it figured out. So I performed that version, even on the days I didn’t feel her.
What I’ve learned since: healing isn’t a finished state. It’s not a garden you finally get to walk through, tidy and blooming on schedule. It’s closer to a wildflower field after a storm, with some stems bent and some still standing, growth and damage occupying the same ground at the same time.
Key takeaways
- Healing is ongoing, not a finished state you arrive at.
- “Performing healed” is usually a protective reflex, not dishonesty.
- Real healing is slower and messier, and you can be bent and blooming at the same time.
What Performing Healed Looks Like
Performing healed is answering “I’m good!” before the question is even finished. It’s posting the calm caption over the hard week. It’s showing up to the group chat with wisdom you haven’t actually tested yet, because wisdom is easier to type than to live.
It’s not dishonesty, exactly. It’s more like a reflex, the same one that taught so many of us, early and often, that our rawest moments were inconvenient for other people. So we learned to skip ahead to the resolved version of the story, even when we were still standing in the middle of it.
What Real Healing Has Looked Like Instead
Slower. Less photogenic. Occasionally embarrassing.
It has looked like crying in the car before a meeting and then walking into that meeting anyway. Not because I’d “gotten over it,” but because both things were allowed to be true at once. It has looked like telling a friend “actually, I’m not okay today” and finding out the friendship survived the honesty just fine. It has looked like doing the same hard boundary-setting conversation three separate times because I didn’t get it right the first two.
None of that would have made a good highlight reel. All of it was the actual work.
A Question Worth Sitting With
If you’re in a season like this, here’s a gentle prompt, not a fix: where in your life right now are you performing healed instead of actually healing? Not to shame yourself for it. The performance usually made sense once, as protection. Just to notice it. Noticing is where the bent stem starts to straighten.
You don’t need to have this figured out to be worthy of growing wild. Bent and blooming can be the same sentence.
If this resonated, hit reply on our next email and tell us what healing actually looks like for you right now. No performing required. Join the list to get it.
Leave a Reply