The Art of Staying
Healing is not linear, but it is relational.
As a teenager, I didn’t want anything to do with my story. I remember a vivid desire to be anywhere but in my body. I wanted to be living a different life. I was more concerned with finding acceptance outside of myself, searching for ways to emanate something new, something different, than being me.
It is a kind of oxymoron, a weird, squiggly journey, to start with such an adverse concept of self, only to find that love and wholeheartedness are about coming home to your own body, thoughts, emotions, and process… to own your story.
This healing path has taken me many places, one of the most significant being self-trust. What a gift it has been to learn that it is safe to have an opinion, to own agency, to take up space in the world. It felt so unstable at first to build confidence in things that were once suppressed and locked down. I had to tend to and employ new relational skills to shape what felt like emotionally younger parts coming back online. The development needed was confronting.
But as I stayed with myself (loving and witnessing my inner world) I began to experience gradual integration, integrity, and connection.
I went from feeling like I had to not only own my story, but protect it, fight for it, and even shun the world because of the pain I uncovered as I processed my own self-abandonment… to owning my story with more openness. More softness. A place where I don’t need to prove it. A grace. A joy. A relationship with my pain that feels wholesome. A trust not just in me, but in how my life is unfolding.
The bridge between these experiences was mostly grief.
Through this, I’ve come to understand the power of connection in healing. I don’t believe the point of healing is to end up on an island of superiority or self-righteousness. The point of healing is connection, to self, and to others.
This is why it is such a nuanced journey. The path toward connection looks different for each person who chooses to walk it. It’s shaped by timing, tenderness, rupture, and repair; by what our nervous system learned early, and what it is ready to unlearn now.
Sometimes the first doorway is inner safety. Regulation and nervous system support need to come before intimacy and relational skills feel accessible. It’s the slow work of learning how to be with ourselves before we can truly meet another. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Choosing connection in relationship, even before it is fully embodied, creates enough relief and spaciousness for deeper inner work to begin. And often, it’s not one or the other. It’s a slow, nuanced weaving of both, capacity building inwardly and outwardly, side by side, over time.
There is no single right order. Your story will be uniquely yours, because your system knows the way it needs to move.
I notice that when I truly own my story, and continue to support my system with the resources that actually land for me, comparison loses its grip. I stop measuring my progress against an imagined timeline, or a version of how this “should” look. Instead, I listen… and something softer and wiser takes its place. How this process unfolds for me, as I learn to be present, build safety, and grow my capacity to stay with what arises, is enough. It is not behind. It is not wrong. It is responsive to the body and life I am living.
My story is beautiful just as it is. And so is yours.
I’d love to ask: where might you soften your grip on comparison, and listen more closely to what your own system is asking for right now?
