I stopped trying to become my old self and started respecting the one I am now

Dear Delyara, For years, healing meant trying to get back. Back to the old energy. The old body. The old confidence. The old appetite for life. The old marriage-before-it-broke, the old career-before-it-drained me, the old self before fear entered so many rooms. I don’t think that is healing anymore. I think it was grief refusing to change its language. Now I am trying something else. Not going back. Respecting forward. Respecting the body I have now. The limits I have now. The experience I have now. The tenderness I need now. The ways I have changed that are not all losses, even if some of them came through loss. It is not easy. It is much truer. Healing, I am learning, is not becoming the person pain didn’t happen to. It is becoming someone who no longer abandons herself because pain did.