The Part They Don’t Tell You About Healing

You did the thing.
The journal.
The forgiveness letter.
The full moon ritual.
The affirmation.
The breathwork.
The crystal grid.

And for a while, it helped.
You felt clearer.
Stronger.
Calmer.

But then it came back.
The ache.
The grief.
The silence that felt more like static than peace.
And you thought “I already healed this. Why is it still here?”

But no one told you this part.
No one told you that numbness can look like healing.
That stillness can be a survival state.
That the absence of chaos doesn’t mean you’re okay.
It just means your body found a way to cope.

You didn’t heal.
You just got better at hiding it from yourself.
You didn’t transcend it.
You skipped it.

Not by fault - by design.

You were taught to fix your pain, not feel it.
Taught to say the affirmation before the truth.
Taught to “let it go” before it ever had a chance to land.
And here’s the truth:
You’re not broken.

You just never got to descend.

No one told you healing wasn’t supposed to feel good right away.
That sometimes it hurts more when it starts to work.
Because for the first time, you’re not escaping.
You’re staying.
This is the part that doesn’t get shared on Instagram.
The part that doesn’t glow.
The part that doesn’t perform well as content.
This is the part where you don’t know what’s wrong only that something still feels missing.

It’s not missing.
It’s buried.
Under every bypass.
Under every “I’m fine.”
Under every time you said “I’ve moved on” when your body was still clinging to the wreckage.

This ache is not failure.
It’s the map.
It’s the sign that something sacred is ready to be felt.
And this time you don’t have to abandon yourself to survive it.

Let it hurt.
Let it hollow you.
Let it unravel what was never real.
Because beneath all the rituals and mantras and medicine wheels, there’s a part of you that never got to be held.
That part doesn’t want to be fixed.
It wants to be witnessed.

And that,
that is the descent.