The question “how do you heal?” is still on my mind.
And I have some compost collected that feels like the start of an answer.
Thing number one is that underneath this question I feel another question: how do you learn to love (again)? There are plenty of times where healing involves repairing a relationship or returning yourself to a place where it feels safe enough to be vulnerable. In my case, this isn’t a question of how to love someone else or another person. It’s how do you learn to love yourself, again or for the first time. And sometimes, I think this is the heart of the thing that was broken in the first place, that the human self was forgotten or abandoned in the pursuit of something else.
I tried to google this once, in a different form. I wanted to know how to love myself in photos. I meant the physical version of myself, but isn’t that question really about self-image? Was I not asking how to see myself and like her? It felt superficial at the time, but maybe it was a metaphor that I couldn’t see then. How we see ourselves on the outside is a mirror to how we feel about ourselves on the inside.
Thing number two is something that feels completely uncomfortable for a codependent and female human who internalized that her purpose was to be a human giver. And that is that healing requires constant self-care and paying deep, gentle, kind attention to my body and myself.
For the longest time, this has felt radically selfish. At another point in the past, I wrote an absurdly long email about how scared I was of my selfishness. This is the trick of codependency – it convinces you that doing anything at all for yourself is some type of personal failing, instead of a type of love and care. Being able to meet your own needs is a type of freedom. This is a place where I’m spending a lot of energy to unlearn that conditioning. And one of the lessons that keeps amazing me is that the more energy I spend caring for and healing myself, the more it opens me up to other people and to sharing, without the need to bend over backwards or deny myself in the process.
Thing number three is that the more space I make for healing, the more committed it makes me to creating spaces that allow not only self-discovery, but self-knowledge. This is what gives me hope about what I dream of making and bringing into the world this year – that they can be spaces for humans to connect with all of the parts of themselves, to find and reintegrate parts of ourselves that we have cut off or have a hard time loving. That’s what I want for all of us – to find a way to feel whole.