Today, as I sit in my home office writing this blog, my heart feels heavy.
It’s one of those days where I’m questioning whether I’m on the right path. I’m looking around my home office at everything I’ve spent the last few years building— full-time job, Beneath the Silence Healing, the coaching programs, the podcast, the workshops—and wondering if any of it is making the difference I hoped it would. I still have work to finish today. I still have emails to answer, clients to see, and ideas I’ve been excited to write about. From the outside, today probably looks like any other workday.
But it doesn’t feel like any other day.
There are days I move through everything I planned without much difficulty. Then there are days like today, when something shifts inside me that I can’t fully explain. The ground I thought had finally become steady begins to feel unfamiliar again. Questions I thought I had already worked through quietly find their way back.
Have I really made progress?
Why am I still feeling this way after everything I’ve survived?
Those questions used to scare me.
They used to make me wonder if I was somehow back where I started.
But the longer I sit with those thoughts, the more I realize that’s not actually what’s happening.
In fact, I’ve asked myself those same questions more than once over the years.
The first time, I was too young to understand what I was asking.
After my parents died, I kept waiting for the day I would feel like myself again. I didn’t know what healing was supposed to look like, so I measured it by how I felt. If I was still having nightmares, I assumed I wasn’t getting better. If certain memories still made my chest tight, I assumed I was doing something wrong. I spent years believing that progress meant one day I would stop feeling the weight of what had happened.
Life has a way of challenging the things we believe.
Last year, I lost my grandfather.
A few months later, I lost my best friend.
I remember sitting in my apartment one evening after my best friend’s funeral. The house was quiet, but my mind wasn’t. I kept thinking about all the people I had loved and buried throughout my life. My parents. My brother. My grandfather. Now my best friend.
And for the first time as an adult, I asked myself something I had never put into words before.
How many times can one person rebuild their life?
I wasn’t asking because I wanted to give up. I was asking because I was tired. Not tired of living. Tired of feeling like every major loss required me to become an entirely different person. Looking back now, I think I was asking the wrong question.
The question was never, “How many times can one person rebuild their life?” The real question was, “Why do I keep believing I have to start over?”
The more I sat with that thought over the following weeks, the more I realized how often I’d measured healing by whether I still struggled. If I was still questioning myself, I assumed I wasn’t making progress. If grief still found me years later, I assumed I hadn’t healed. If I still had days where everything felt heavy, I quietly wondered whether I had somehow failed. I don’t know where I learned that. Maybe it came from the messages so many of us grow up hearing.
“You’re so strong.”
“You’ll get through this.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
None of those statements are necessarily meant to cause harm. Most people say them because they genuinely want to comfort us. But somewhere along the way, I turned them into expectations. I began believing that if enough time passed, I shouldn’t still be struggling. That if I had really healed, I would stop having days like the one I’m having today. It took me a long time to realize that healing had never asked me to stop being human. I don’t think I would have understood that if it weren’t for the work I do today.
For the past 9 years, I’ve worked in the mental health field. If I’m honest, I think this work has taught me as much about being human as it has about mental health. Every day I sit with people whose lives have changed in ways they never expected. Some are grieving the death of someone they love. Others are trying to rebuild after divorce, addiction, chronic illness, domestic violence, or years of trauma that no one ever acknowledged. The circumstances are different, but after a while you begin to notice that the questions people ask themselves are remarkably similar. Why can’t I move on? Why am I still struggling? Will I ever feel like myself again? Sitting with these types of questions day after day has forced me to recognize something I spent years missing in my own life.
As I sat here this afternoon, I realized that I ask other people these same questions all the time. Not directly, but through the conversations we have. I spend my days reminding people that healing isn’t linear, that difficult days don’t erase the progress they’ve made, and that one hard moment doesn’t mean they’re back where they started.
Then I caught myself.
I was doing the very thing I encourage other people not to do.
I was measuring my healing by how I felt today instead of everything I’ve learned through the years.
Experience has taught me something I don’t think anyone could have taught me in a classroom.
As long as I am alive, there will probably be days when grief feels close again. There will be mornings when I question myself, seasons when I feel uncertain, and moments when life asks me to let go of something I never wanted to lose. That’s part of being human. It doesn’t matter how many books I read, how many years I work in mental health, or how much healing I’ve done. Loving deeply means I will continue to feel deeply.
The difference is that I no longer believe those feelings tell me who I am. Years ago, when I had a hard day, I thought it meant I wasn’t healing. Today, I understand that having a hard day simply means I’m human. Those are two very different things. I still question myself sometimes. I still miss the people I love. I still have mornings where my heart feels heavier than it did the day before.
But those moments no longer define me.
They visit me.
They don’t become me.
That’s what experience has taught me.
Not how to stop hurting.
But how to stop letting the hurt decide who I am.
Tomorrow I’ll probably wake up and continue asking some of the same questions. I’ll probably have more days where the ground doesn’t feel as steady as I hoped it would. There will still be mornings when grief feels close, moments when I question myself, and seasons that ask more of me than I think I have to give.
But tonight, as I finish writing this, I know something I didn’t know a year ago.
I’m not starting over.
I’m still becoming.
And if you’re reading this while questioning yourself the way I questioned myself today, I hope you’ll give yourself something I have to remind myself of often.
Have mercy on your soul.
You’re doing the best you can with the understanding, strength, and capacity you have today.
Some days that will look like moving mountains. Other days it will look like simply getting through the day. Neither one makes you more or less worthy. Neither one determines how far you’ve come.
Healing isn’t asking you to prove yourself every morning. Life isn’t asking you to have all the answers. Sometimes, the bravest thing you can do is wake up, stay present, and trust that the person you’re becoming is being shaped even on the days when you can’t see it.
Be gentle with yourself.
You’re still becoming.
