May 1st. Already. I’m not sure where the first 4 months of the year went. They passed by in a blur it seems. I’ve been so focused on my mental health, healing, self love, self worth, putting my self and my family first, whole kind of a journey, that it seems the days, weeks and months have quickly passed me by. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, or a bad thing. They do say time passes faster when you are having fun?? So??

So here I am. Finding a few minutes to sit down and write. I’m not sure what exactly I want to write, or should write. So I will just let it flow, and hope it makes sense to someone else besides just me. Let’s do this. Healing is a wild ride. That’s what’s on my mind. So let’s talk about that. As much as the thought of typing out what I’m about to gives me so much anxiety, let’s do it anyway. Let’s talk healing.

February 2020 my world changed. I’ve never hidden that fact. February 2020 completely kicked my ass, and February quickly turned into March 2020. To say that so much happened, would be such an understatement. SO SO SO much happened. That honestly I’m not sure I ever got a chance to process anything before the events kept coming. One after the other. I know I didn’t process it all, not properly. The amount of change, emotions, events, trauma, trauma that has resulted in PTSD between February 2020 and Summer of 2022, and even into today, it’s unreal. The amount of therapy I have been in, group therapy, support groups, programs and more therapy.

One thing I have learned, and been reminded of all the time, is that healing is not linear. It is up and down, its round and round, its 1 step forward and 5 steps back. There are moments where I have just cried on the floor gasping for air saying repeatedly that I can’t keep doing this, it all hurts too much. Healing hurts too much. Healing is messy, it can be painful, and it is most definalty not linear.

And yet sometimes healing can surprise us. Well at least it does for me.

I didn’t realize how far I had come, I didn’t realize how deep I had been. I had just been so focused on surviving. The other day I cleaned out my medicine cabinet. One of those annoying tasks I had put off for awhile. But when I finally did it, I was shocked. I found 16 pill bottles. 16. All dated between Feb 2020, and March 2022. And those are only the bottles left behind, not the ones I had finished and thrown out. Different medications I tried and reacted badly to and threw out. 16 bottles. Only 2 out of the 16 were for anxiety. Incase I had an anxiety attack. The rest, 14 bottles, were for the effects that stress, anxiety, depression and trauma had on my body. All the physical pain, and problems I was having because my body just could not keep up. On top of everything else, I had had two biopsies done in the first part of 2022. It was a lot for my mind and body to deal with.
By July 2022, something in my life, something in me, had shifted and changed. I stopped all my meds. At the time I didn’t even notice really. It never dawned on me what a milestone that was. Summer of 2022 ended up being such a transformative summer for me, and I didn’t fully grasp the whole picture until I saw those pill bottles and saw in black and white, the damage that my body was going through, still trying to heal from, and still dealing with.

When I saw all those bottles together on my counter I just sat and cried looking at them all and thinking back, looking at all the dates on them and remembering all those events that lead to each bottle. I was in such a fog, I didn’t realize how bad it was, I didn’t realize just how far I have come in almost a year since I stopped taking them. How much my life has changed since 2020. How much I have changed and grown, in ways I never dreamed of. I felt such relief at this realization of how far I have come.

Now I do things differently than I did before, for example I find a new sense of peace and calmness out in nature. Nature walks have been game changing for me. I used to avoid hikes because I would always came out with hives. And while I still get hives, they seem to be less so. I spend my time my garden, which if you knew be before 2020 that thought would just be so laughable. I have my indoor plants. So many indoor plants. One bad days, I find calmness in my indoor plants if I can’t get outside. I journal, which I always did before, so that’s almost like a comfort thing. I’ve already posted about my plants, you can read that here. I’ve changed up my morning routine, you can read about that here. Oh! I should share about my evenings! Oh goodness, I think that may need to be another post. Back to the topic at hand…

I’m not saying I’m all better. I’m not saying I’m all enlightened and healed. I’m not. Far from it. I still have bad days. I still get triggered by certain noises, smells and such. I still have nightmares and wake up in a cold sweat and crying. There are days when the anxiety and fear is overwhelming. I still feel those physical effects on my body, they just aren’t as bad as before. And that’s progress. Sometimes it feels slow. But progress is still progress no matter how small the steps.

It’s a healing journey for so much more than just what’s happened since 2020. Some of the events that have happened since 2020 brought up previous events that had been dealt with, healed and moved on from, some events opened old “wounds”. And some events completely re-wrote and changed what I had believed previously. And some events caused all “brand new” trauma and PTSD. It’s all be a lot.

Healing is such a journey. Finding your way back to yourself, but not your old self exactly, a new self, it is a wild ride. I know I’m still very much in the middle of it. But oh my goodness, I am so excited to see where this journey leads, the ups and even the downs, the twists and turns, all of it. To learn my own strength. To realize my own strength. That’s something I just marvel in some days, to realize how far I have come. To learn and embrace self love, and self worth. To know, and fully believe that I am worthy. That I am loved. That I am safe. That I am worthy of all things good, of healing, of happiness.

And with all this, comes learning boundaries. Oh but I feel like that’s a whole other talk. Oh boundaries. They sound easy enough, but they aren’t always. Are they needed? Absolutely. Does that make it any easier??? Well maybe one day.

Hope my rambling made sense. I’m still learning. I’m still healing. I’m still moving forward. I’m not sure what the point of this was, other than to share, just to get it out there, to write it out, to see it in black and white.

Onward and upward. Continuing on the healing journey.