Healing doesn’t always arrive in calm moments or curated routines. It doesn’t always come wrapped in yoga mats, green tea, and peaceful rituals. Sometimes healing is messy, clumsy, and quiet. Sometimes it’s survival disguised as normal.

There are days when healing looks like noise canceling headphones in a grocery store aisle. When the world feels too loud, too close, too much, and you’re just trying to stay upright. You’re not tuning out. You’re protecting what little calm you have left.

Some days, healing is praying no one makes eye contact. Not because you’re rude or distant, but because one unexpected interaction could shatter your focus, your breathing, your balance. Healing, for some of us, is keeping it together just long enough to make it back to the car.

This isn’t weakness. This is strength most people will never understand. It is the quiet, unseen work of survivors who keep showing up, even when everything in their body is screaming not to. And that counts too. That is healing, just not the kind that fits on a vision board.