People don’t understand that healing isn’t a glow-up.

It’s a bloodbath.

It’s standing in the wreckage of everything you tolerated and realizing the monster wasn’t just him – it was the version of you that stayed. The one who kept making excuses. Who kept saying, “It’s not that bad.” Who kept believing that love meant surviving someone else’s chaos.

Healing isn’t pretty. It’s not yoga and matcha and self-help quotes that sound like lullabies. It’s gutting. It’s the slow unlearning of everything you accepted as normal. It’s crying over the memories that used to make you smile, because now you see them for what they were – warnings you ignored, red flags you called sunsets.

It’s waking up one morning and realizing you don’t recognize yourself – not because you’re lost, but because you’ve finally stopped pretending.

Everyone talks about self-love like it’s a soft thing. But real healing is violent. It’s ripping out roots that have grown around your ribs. It’s confronting the parts of you that allowed the damage to repeat. It’s whispering to yourself, “Never again,” and meaning it, even when your body still shakes from the echo of his name.

People romanticize recovery. They want the after photo, not the process. They want the glow, not the gore.

But healing isn’t transformation – it’s resurrection.

And resurrection hurts.

You have to bury who you were to become who you are. You have to grieve her – the one who begged to be chosen, the one who thought love was earned through endurance. You have to hold her hand in the dark and tell her she did her best, even when her best nearly destroyed her.

And then you rise. Not glowing, but bleeding. Not smiling, but breathing.

Because healing isn’t the soft return to light. It’s crawling through your own shadow until you remember how to stand in it without flinching.