I’ve been watching people try to pull themselves back together, and the real moments—the ones nobody posts about—always stay with me.
They don’t look inspiring. They look painfully human.
A friend once told me she sat on the floor of her shower for half an hour because the water felt steadier than she did. She didn’t plan it or dramatize it; she just couldn’t stand upright that day.
Another person said she brushed her teeth three times in a row because she kept zoning out mid-way and forgetting if she’d even started. She laughed when she admitted it, but the kind of laugh that cracks a little at the edges.
These are the moments that never make it into anyone’s “healing journey,” but they’re the ones that reveal what the whole process actually feels like.
You’re living your life—going to work, answering questions, doing dishes—
while another part of you is quietly falling apart, or rearranging itself, or grieving something you can’t quite name.
There’s this heavy kind of shame that shows up in the middle of all this.
Not the dramatic, chest-beating kind. The smaller one.
The one that whispers, “Why are you like this?”
when you freeze in the supermarket aisle because the brand of biscuits you always buy suddenly reminds you of a whole chapter you’re trying not to think about.
Or when you snap at someone you love and immediately feel that sinking, stomach-dropping guilt because they didn’t deserve it —
you were just overwhelmed and didn’t know where to put the feeling.
One friend once confessed she started sleeping with a pillow on her stomach because it made her feel anchored. Not comforted—anchored. As if the weight could keep her from floating off into the same fear she thought she’d outgrown years ago.
Another said he kept his dirty laundry in neat piles on the floor because washing it meant admitting the week had happened, and he just wasn’t ready yet.
These sound ridiculous when you say them out loud, but they’re not. They’re real. They’re the private negotiations we make with ourselves when everything feels slightly tilted.
But something shifts eventually—never in a grand way, always in the margins.
- You wake up and realize you’re breathing a little deeper. Not because life suddenly got easier, but because you finally let yourself stop pretending you weren’t hurting.
- You notice you’re eating actual meals again instead of whatever’s fastest.
- You catch yourself answering a message without rehearsing the entire conversation in your head.
- You hold your own gaze in the mirror for a second longer than usual.
None of these moments announce themselves. You only notice them when they start stacking quietly and the weight of your days feels a little different.
Not lighter, necessarily—just more honest.
What I’ve learned watching all this is that becoming yourself again isn’t about “improving.”
It’s about stopping the performance.
It’s sitting with the parts you’d rather hide—the jealousy, the fear, the resentment, the regret—and realizing that none of them make you unworthy.
They just make you human. And human is enough.
Messy, uneven, awkward, stumbling human.
If you’re in the middle of all this—
trying to grow, trying to forgive yourself, trying not to fall back into old patterns—you’re not doing it wrong.
You’re doing it the only way real people do:
slowly, quietly, imperfectly, and with far more courage than you give yourself credit for.
You don’t need to look whole to be healing.
You just need to keep showing up to your own life, even if some days the best you can do is breathe and try again tomorrow.
That’s the work.
And it’s more than enough.
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