We have been given a strange image of healing. As though it is a destination. A finish line. A version of ourselves we will one day arrive at, regulated and serene, with all our edges smoothed.
But the body does not work like that. It is not a project. It is a living thing. And living things do not finish. They unfold, in seasons, in cycles, in their own quiet timing.
What if your nervous system is more like a garden than a machine? Something that responds to weather. Something that needs light, and water, and stillness, and time. Something that has its own rhythm, which is not always the rhythm of the world around it.
A gardener does not shame the soil for being tired in winter. They do not pull at the seedlings to make them grow faster. They tend. They notice. They trust that what is hidden is still happening.
This is the work, if we can call it work. To learn what your particular soil needs. To notice which seasons leave you depleted, and which ones gently restore you. To stop demanding bloom from a body that is asking, instead, for rest.
Some days you will feel open and warm and full of light. Some days you will feel grey and quiet and far away. Both are the garden. Both are you. Neither is a failure.
Healing, then, is not a finish line. It is a relationship. A slow, lifelong tending. The willingness to keep returning — with kindness, with patience — to the soil of your own life, and to trust that what is happening underneath is its own kind of growing.
You are not a problem to be solved. You are a garden. And you are allowed to grow at the pace of something alive. We have been given a strange image of healing. As though it is a destination. A finish line. A version of ourselves we will one day arrive at, regulated and serene, with all our edges smoothed.
