Survival With Better Posture

There’s a quiet kind of healing that doesn’t look like progress at all. It doesn’t announce itself with milestones or neat before-and-after photos. It doesn’t feel victorious, doesn’t arrive with relief or applause or the satisfying click of something finally being fixed. Most of the time, it just looks like survival with better posture, standing a little straighter under the same weight, learning how to carry what never left. For me, a lot of that healing lives in my journals, in spiral notebooks and dog-eared pages that absorbed the things I couldn’t say out loud. They held the nights I wrote on the bathroom floor, the mornings I wrote through shaking hands, the moments when breathing itself felt like work. While the world expected visible progress, my healing was happening quietly, ink by ink, in margins and smudges, in words written only to keep myself alive.

Our brains are protective, they’re also liars… not cruel ones, not intentional ones, but the kind that love us enough to bend the truth so we don’t break. They soften memories the way sea glass is softened by water, grinding down sharp edges so they’re safe to hold. They blur details, shuffle timelines, rewrite motives so the story hurts less when we replay it at night. Over time, we learn how to gaslight ourselves with unsettling skill. We tell ourselves we were being dramatic, that it wasn’t that bad, that we misunderstood tone, intent, love. We convince ourselves that we overreacted, that we imagined the cracks forming long before the collapse. Sometimes we swing the other way entirely, casting ourselves as the villain in stories we weren’t ready to sit with yet, swallowing blame because it felt easier than facing what was done to us. Other times, we make ourselves the victim in situations we helped create, because accountability felt heavier than grief, because owning our choices felt like one more thing we couldn’t carry. We mentally edit our own history until it’s survivable, until it fits inside a single day without crushing us.

My journals don’t do that. They don’t protect me. They don’t soften anything or step in to cushion the fall. They hold exactly what I felt in real time… raw, unedited, unprocessed, still bleeding onto the page. The panic before it made sense, when my chest felt like it was caving in and my thoughts raced faster than language could keep up. The grief before it became poetic, before it learned how to wear metaphors instead of screams. The anger before it learned how to sound reasonable, easier, or justified to anyone else. These pages don’t care who looks better in hindsight or who history might excuse. They don’t smooth out contradictions or sand down my uglier truths. They don’t adjust themselves to fit the story I tell now, the version I’ve rehearsed for survival. They just sit there, stubborn and honest, heavy with ink and truth, waiting for me to remember exactly how much it hurt.

When I go back and read them, it’s shocking in a way that still throws me off. Five years ago, when things were truly unraveling in my marriage, when I was writing in fragments because even sentences felt like too much effort. Seven years ago, when Chris died, when the ink looks heavier, darker, like I was pressing the pen into the page just to prove I was still here. Eight years ago, when my mom died and the world split cleanly into before and after, and every entry reads like I’m reaching for something that’s already gone. Sixteen years ago, pregnant with my oldest, terrified in a way I didn’t yet have language for… fear that lived in my bones, fear that whispered at night about failing before I’d even begun. Twenty years ago, crying over high school drama that felt like the end of the world because, at the time, it truly was my entire world. I’m often stunned by how different these moments feel on the page compared to how I remember them now. My memory has sanded them down, softened them, turned them into something I can carry without collapsing. But the journals don’t let me forget: it really was that hard. I really was drowning. I really didn’t know how I would survive the next hour, let alone the next year.

And what hits me hardest is realizing that in every single entry, I was convinced that moment was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, a bottom I was certain I’d reached, a pain I believed nothing could eclipse. Each page reads like a final plea, a declaration that surely this was as bad as life could get. And then I kept living. And life kept adding weight. Loss stacked on loss, one grief barely set down before another was pressed into my arms. Grief learned new shapes, new postures, new ways to inhabit my body. Pain didn’t disappear; it evolved, sharpened in some places, dulled in others, finding new rooms to live in. Each season rewrote my understanding of “unbearable,” stretching my capacity in ways I never asked for, proving that what once threatened to destroy me was only the beginning of what I would be asked to carry.

I’m 36 now, and my life looks nothing like the future I sketched in my head as a teenager, full of certainty and straight lines. That version of me thought life would unfold predictably, reward effort cleanly, and make sense if I did everything right. But this life, this one I’m standing in, looks like more than I could have dared to dream of during the seasons when I lost my grandpa, my mom, my niece, and my brother, when my prayers were small and desperate and mostly sounded like please just let me survive this. Life has a way of shifting the goalposts without asking permission, moving the finish line while you’re still crawling toward it. What once felt impossible becomes normal, almost unremarkable. What once felt barely survivable becomes the baseline you build from. And I think that’s where healing gets confusing, because you can be standing inside a life you once begged for and still feel disoriented, still feel the ache of wanting more, still wonder why the relief you expected never fully arrived.

We think healing means the pain should stop entirely, that one day we’ll wake up and realize it no longer follows us from room to room. We believe that once we arrive at the future version of ourselves we once begged for, everything will finally feel settled, quiet, resolved. But healing doesn’t erase longing, it just changes the shape of it. I remember sitting on the bathroom floor, back against the tub, crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, bargaining with the universe for a life that looked exactly like the one I have now. I dreamed of stability like it was salvation, of safety like it was a destination, of simply being okay as if that would be the end of the story. And here I am… and I am okay. I do feel emotionally safe. But I still feel sadness slipping in through the cracks. I still feel the pull toward more… more to accomplish, more to earn, more to become, like the horizon keeps moving even when my feet are tired. I still feel restless at times, suspended in the strange middle between then and whatever comes next. And that’s such a disorienting thing to hold: gratitude and grief coexisting in the same chest, neither one canceling the other out, both insisting they belong.

Reading my journals reminds me that this doesn’t mean I’m failing at healing; it means my definition of healing has quietly shifted beneath my feet. What once felt like salvation now feels like the starting line, a place I thought was the finish because I was too exhausted to imagine anything beyond it. What once felt like survival, just making it through the day, the hour, the next breath, now feels like the foundation everything else was built on. The journals don’t let me rewrite my past or soften its edges, but they don’t trap me there either. They show me the distance traveled without pretending it was graceful, without editing out the collapse, the mess, the moments I barely held myself together. They let me witness the versions of myself who had no idea how the story would turn out, who kept loving with open hands, kept hoping without guarantees, kept enduring even when endurance felt pointless, and somehow carried me here.

Maybe that’s the real gift, the one no one talks about because it isn’t pretty or marketable. Not closure, with its neat bow and final chapter. Not peace, the kind that implies everything is resolved, and nothing still aches. But honesty. The kind that sits with you in the quiet and doesn’t flinch. The kind that looks you straight in the face and says: you survived things you once thought would destroy you, things you were certain would be the end of you, and somehow you’re still here, still breathing, still becoming. And it’s okay that you’re still reaching, still stretching toward something more even with tired hands. It’s okay that healing doesn’t feel finished, that it keeps unfolding instead of concluding. It was never meant to be a destination. It was always meant to be a continuation.