The Howling Pain of a Healing Heart

Healing ain’t for the faint of heart.

It comes at a huge cost—the cost of the version of ourselves we built to survive.
All the pain, grief, shame, sorrow that we so skillfully managed to store away somewhere in the body demands to be acknowledged and loved.
And it’s not romantic, it’s not a fairy tale.
It’s a raw rite of passage—crushing and liberating.

It’s like that moment when you have no more strength, you cannot go on anymore.
You think you cannot birth the baby, you cannot continue the work, you cannot survive another night with a screaming child, you cannot bear one more day of grieving your beloved, you cannot think straight—or at all.
All you want to do is crawl on the floor, howl like the wounded animal you are, scream with your raw, guttural voice, and beg for the pain to stop—now.

Because that pain is ripping your chest apart, pressing so heavily you can’t breathe, tormenting your mind day and night (and especially at night), and you wonder if you’ll ever be sane again—or sleep at all.

The pain of a healing heart is feral.
It’s all the pain you put on hold, coming together to be seen, felt, loved.
And it takes courage.
It takes heart.
It takes gentle surrender.
And strength.

You will be again on that floor, weeping and screaming, breathing through gulps of sorrow, feeling all that you knew about yourself crumble apart.
And you’ll be standing there—naked, without any protection, exposed and vulnerable.
But you’ll be standing within, because the strength you were searching for all those years was trapped under the layers you built to protect yourself.

And the more you fall apart, the stronger you’ll stand—in the midst of the storm, which is a proper hurricane of emotions and fears and aches and thoughts.

You will be there.
You.
Finally, the you that you’ve been hiding all this time is coming to the surface.
And you are finally knowing yourself—for the first time in years, in eons.

And it’s beautiful.
You are beautiful.
You have died and given birth to yourself again.

Life starts now. Welcome.