One of the greatest misconceptions about healing is that it looks like progress.
That if you are healing, you must be moving forward.
That if you are doing the work, you must eventually arrive at peace.
That if enough time passes, the pain should somehow become smaller, quieter, easier to carry.
I wish it were that simple.
The truth is…
Healing, for me, has rarely looked like a straight line.
It has looked like leaving… and going back.
Leaving again… and going back again.
It has looked like knowing something was destroying me, and still being pulled toward what felt familiar.
That was true when I left my abusive first husband.
And if I am honest…
That has also been true in the healing itself.
Because healing does not always move forward.
Sometimes it circles back.
Sometimes it drags old wounds into new seasons.
Sometimes it shows up in a nightmare, in a raised voice, in intimacy, in criticism, in a memory you thought you had already survived.
Sometimes it arrives in the body before the mind even understands what is happening.
There were moments I thought:
I should be past this by now.
And yet there I was…
Crying over something I thought I had already buried.
Flinching at things that should not have scared me.
Questioning why grief still found me years later.
Wondering why peace sometimes felt harder to trust than pain.
What no one told me about healing is that sometimes it asks you to look inward again and again.
To trace the pain all the way back.
To your choices.
To your patterns.
To your coping mechanisms.
To the stories your family carried long before you were ever born.
Because for me, healing was never just about surviving abuse.
It became about breaking generational trauma.
About realizing that some of the pain I carried did not begin with me.
But if I was willing to face it…
Maybe it could end with me.
That kind of healing is not pretty.
It is not always peaceful.
Sometimes it means confronting the darkness you spent years trying to outrun.
And I have learned something through all of that:
I had to know darkness…
To understand what light truly was.
Even now, there are days I falter.
Days I make mistakes.
Days old pain tries to pull me backward.
Days I feel myself slipping toward places I worked hard to leave behind.
But the difference now is…
I know what to call it.
I know what it is.
And I know how to find my way back.
Because healing is not becoming someone who never struggles.
Healing is becoming someone who recognizes when the darkness returns…
And chooses not to live there.
There is no one way to heal.
There is no perfect timeline.
There is no finish line.
There is only the courage to keep choosing yourself…
Again.
And again.
And again.
— Jennifer Rene Wallace
Add comment
Comments
Love your poems
I still can't find myself because I don't remember were I'm from. I know where I am but I am truly lost. You found me and helped carry me and your mother for that I am thankful 🙏🙏🙏🙏. Please keep writing I cherish every word my girl.
<3