If You Want To Heal, You Must Let Yourself Grieve 

One day you will realize your grieving. How harsh you are with letting go of your old self, yet how soft you are coming into someone new.

You will realize you are letting go of a person who didn’t do something about their trauma and healing because then that would mean having to face it all in the first place. It’s denial and you’re fighting it for all that it’s worth.

But one day you will realize the necessity of paying attention to it all: your experience, how you reacted to it, what you’re doing about it now. It might be slow and in small moments and it might be all at once: the shame, the anger, the sadness, the frustration, the emptiness. You are sad about what happened to you. You are ashamed of what happened to you. You are angry that you buried it all in the pit of your stomach, angry you didn’t do something about it sooner. You are lonely. You are feeling heavy, yet empty.

Although everything you’re feeling is valid, I want you to know that you won’t be feeling it all forever. It’s going to take some time to find solace with where you are in this healing journey, and that’s okay. One day it will hit you how badly you need to face it head-on, grieve the person you once were, and let go.

One day you will realize how you’ve been self-sabotaging: holding yourself back from your necessary growth as a means of protection. Thank your body for protecting you when it needed to, but also give yourself the grace to know when you have to step further into the pain in order to truly heal. You are hurting yourself by letting the trauma sit heavy in your body. You have to release it.

One day you will realize just how necessary it is to face your pain. You have to grieve your old self — the person who was avoidant and in denial. You have to welcome with warm arms someone new, someone who wants to heal and wants to do something about their healing.