What You Lose When You Heal

thoughts from a grieving spirit // an essay

Some people prefer to stay away from people with boundaries. They see someone unwilling to stand there and accept everything they want to do as an affront to their personhood. When people's good will towards you is dependent on your ability to accept or ignore their behavior, you either conform or you get shut out.

Is this just an American culture thing? I have no idea. I've never left the country. I think American individualism and capitalism encourages people to pursue primarily what benefits themselves. We do not value strong communities and family support enough.

Family support. I am estranged and this is something I don't have, so I have largely relied on building and maintaining friendships for me to have a sense of support and belonging. This has upsides and downsides. My closest relationships have been with people around my age, often with common interests and similarities in our background. This also means that when I met most of my friends, we were all young, immature, unhealed people, still playing out the patterns we were used to.

I didn't realize the friendships that I had were still built on unhealthy dynamics, and that healing would make most of these relationships impossible to continue. I want to believe that my friends are approaching me as equals, capable and willing to change and grow together for the sake of love and care. I have been proven wrong too many times.

Sometimes there was some power dynamic I ignored, or an ulterior motive I didn't see. But most of the time friends have just failed to take responsibility for their actions when the time comes. It can take weeks, months, or years for you to hurt someone you love. It's inevitable in relationships, and harm should be reconcilable. It's shocking to find out that it isn't - that this person you've built trust with doesn't even want to recognize the harm done, because it might require admitting they caused it.

The harsh truth is that most people aren't ready for this. There's cognitive dissonance based on old narratives of shame and sin. (If I did a bad thing, that would make me a bad person, therefore I didn't do a bad thing.) It's just plain emotional immaturity. I recognize that now. I just failed to recognize it in many people who I trusted in the past. I made the foolish mistake of trusting people with things they didn’t prove they could be responsible for. I have failed to recognize when things change. I hope I can recognize it going forward.

Back to the title of this essay. What do you lose when you heal? Well, friends. That cognitive dissonance I mentioned - that becomes way harder to do. You might actually have to face your own mistakes as well, and the lies you've convinced yourself of, but the bright side is that none of those things make you a terrible person. If you aren't ready to recognize that, that causing harm doesn't mean you deserve hellfire, you aren't ready to take accountability because it would make living irreconcilable.

Most people don't want to face the harm they have caused. We have all acted out of selfishness at one point or another, but some people's actions are so criminal they cannot admit it to themselves. People still have to live with themselves somehow. They have to craft their own stories of victimhood, repeat them, and believe them with ferocity so they can survive.

The mindset I have now is this: I refuse to enable these weak spirits. The truth must be made louder than lies, no matter how painful it is. Accept it or die.

I no longer have confidence that "karma" will serve justice in this life. I don't want to be a pacifist anymore. I believe that too many crimes go unpunished in this fucked up world, and sometimes we find ourselves to be the only ones capable of bringing punishment. When we are the only witness, the weight falls on us, as an individual, to bring light and justice to a wrong that has been done. Most abuse is done in private. Don't let your shame make it stay there.

This is something else I am losing. The ability to stay silent. The world is crazy and complicated and even the people searching for justice get it wrong sometimes. But I won’t let the fear that I may make a mistake get in the way of the trust I have in my convictions anymore.

Something else I am losing is my freeze response. When you trust in your convictions, this affects you on an instinctual level. When presented with danger, you respond by defending yourself. I feel confident that I am transitioning to a fight response, which has been a long-term goal of mine in therapy and it’s something I’m proud of. Never again will I go quietly, and never again will I go down without taking someone with me.

What does this mean, though, in the grand scheme of things? For now, I’m a person who’s guarded as fuck. That’s not great. The hardest part now is learning to trust again. It starts with myself, and so far, that has unfortunately included shutting most people out until I feel more confident. I'm not happy about it, but I know this won't last forever. Nothing does.

Learning to protect myself means protecting myself from people I love, too. It’s scary going forward in ways that your loved ones don’t want you to go down. There’s obviously so much you gain by healing, that makes everything worth it in the end. But I needed to write this, at this time in my life, to acknowledge and sit with this loss that I feel. I need to capture the pain I feel right now, and frame it somehow. Someday I will find my way and find a tribe of people who treat me well, but for now, everything I was comfortable with is gone.

The old ways are gone and cannot be returned to. I have so many good memories that are tainted by what came after. But if I couldn’t recognize that I feel that way because I was hurt, I wouldn’t be in touch with myself. I think even the pain of revisiting the past will fade. I am understanding that time heals a lot of things, but time doesn’t go by passively. It still takes hard work and engagement. Time is what gives you the strength to take actions to recover.

This is where I’m at now. Time has passed, taken a lot with it, and given me things I didn’t expect. Skills, tools, resources, connections. I don’t speak to people who I thought I would know forever. I am closer to other people who I thought were out of reach. Some changes have been worked for, but most have been unexpected.

I should stop expecting things to go the way I plan, and just take life as it comes. Relinquish control. I might actually fuckin relax, who knows?