How Do We Heal?
“This is what healing from trauma feels like: you are holding a dam together with superglue and behind it is a giant ocean of pain and all you have is this superglue for the cracks in the cement. The trickle of pain through those cracks are enough to terrify you, oblivious, thinking, well you look like you're holding it together, you look like you're healing... so you must be fine.”
Nikita Gill
Why do so many of us do this?
Walk around struggling to hold our trauma inside the dam, frantically sealing up the cracks in the wall, terrified it will get out.
Are we too afraid to be seen as damaged or broken?
Are we too afraid that if we acknowledge the pain it will engulf us?
Maybe we feel pressured to look like we are keeping it all together.
But how do we heal from something we can’t even face?
Doesn’t sealing it deep inside only give it more power, more mass, more strength to boil and fester?
Don’t we need to release the pressure?
People say time heals, but I think that’s a lie.
Time alone doesn’t heal.
Time alone allows everything we hold inside to incorporate into our cells and solidify into our bones.
The truth is, we all have pain, grief, sadness, trauma…
The fact that they exist inside all of us doesn’t mean we are broken, it means we are human.
Maybe healing looks more like carving out a spout in the wall.
Allowing the water to flow through, to move and shift, to create little streams and ripples.
Maybe by letting it out, by acknowledging its presence, we can take back our power over it.
What if we utilized time to release rather than hold?
To tug little by little at the stream of pain, and transform it into art, food, writing, music, movement.
Find creative ways to let it live outside of ourselves.
Let it move through us, so we can live through it.
Maybe this is how we heal.
“You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that’s not within your body. Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it live in music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections. Your body is not a coffin for your pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.”