— and why that’s okay
I’ve spent the last few months peeling back layers of myself I didn’t even know were there.
Piece by piece, I’ve named the pain. I’ve written it down. I’ve stared it in the face. And something beautiful started to happen: every time I put words to an old wound, a little weight lifted. Like I had finally given breath to something that had been suffocating in silence for far too long.
It was working — the writing, the remembering, the unraveling.
Healing had a rhythm. And I began to trust it.
Until recently.
I wrote letters to the people closest to me. Letters that came from the deepest, most vulnerable part of my soul. Letters I’d never have been brave enough to write before.
I sent them because I knew they deserved clarity. Because I owed them honesty. Because I’ve spent a lifetime pulling away, and I wanted to offer something real in return.
But something surprised me.
After sending them, I didn’t feel that rush of lightness I’d grown used to.
Instead, I cried.
Every time I reread them, I still cry.
And that’s where the confusion crept in.
Why do I feel worse? Why aren’t these tears washing anything away?
It’s like I expected a sense of release — but what I got instead was more weight. More emotion. More uncertainty. And suddenly I started questioning myself:
Am I doing something wrong?
Why does this feel like I’m falling backwards?
Why does it feel like I’ve landed back in the familiar mess of blame, anger, sadness, and regret?
I thought I had moved forward. I felt like I had.
But now I feel like I’m swimming in the same muddy waters again — only now I know what the water is, and that somehow makes it worse.
The tears have started to feel like failure.
Like evidence that I’m not healing after all.
Like I’ve let myself down for still carrying so much.
But maybe the tears aren’t the enemy.
Maybe they’re just new tears. Different ones. The kind that come when you stop hiding.
Maybe what I’m feeling isn’t regression, but depth. Maybe healing changes its face when it starts involving other people — people I love, people I’ve hurt, people I still long to protect. And that shift… it’s disorienting.
Writing about my own wounds felt safe — I was holding the reins. But writing to the people I care about? That’s a different kind of exposure. That’s putting the softest part of me in someone else’s hands and hoping they’ll hold it with care.
And even though they’ve responded with love, it still feels hard to sit with. I think because, underneath it all, I’m grieving. Grieving the time lost, the misunderstandings, the parts of me I couldn’t show. Grieving the guilt I carried silently for years — and how it didn’t evaporate just because I finally said it out loud.
I realize now: I was hoping that naming it would mean it was over.
But healing doesn’t work like that.
Some pain needs time to settle. Some wounds sting more when they start to close.
And some tears are just the body releasing what the mind has only just begun to understand.
So if you’re here too — if you’ve done the work, spoken the truth, opened the wounds and still feel raw — you’re not doing it wrong. You’re not broken. You’re just in a deeper part of the process.
You are not going backwards.
You are just feeling things more honestly now.
And that’s not failure — that’s growth.
