HEALING AS A PATH RATHER THAN A DESTINATION
26.04.24 | By Andrea Fajardo
When I think of the word heal, some images come to mind, and I choose to stay with one of the first contacts I had with that verb. I was about 8 years old and learning to ride a bike. We went out with mom on a Sunday morning, I got on the bike and she, determined to accompany me on the journey, positioned herself behind me, holding the seat tightly to give me the assurance of her support.
I started pedalling slow, making sure I didn't lose my balance and all of a sudden, I remember getting excited and starting to pedal faster, with pace. I wasn't aware of my own speed, but I remember turning my head back and seeing my mom jogging, with her motherly intention to keep going with me, even if it meant stepping out of her comfort zone (she's never been a person who exercises too much).
I remember my smile all over my face and a sense of security, fulfilment and joy, I felt invincible! I accelerated my pedalling and felt the intention to rectify my experience by looking for my mom to tell her: "Look at me mom, look at me, I'm making it!", I turned my head back and in milliseconds I realized that my mom was no longer holding my seat and that I was losing my balance. The next thing I remember is being on the ground, with strangers around me and my mom running towards me. I struggled between crying and falling into mom's arms and holding back tears as strangers stared at me. My right elbow was burning and hurting up to the middle of my forearm, there was blood and a few layers of skin less, what a scene!
I remember being in bed and feeling a sharp pain every time I rested my arm on any surface. I wanted it to not hurt anymore, I wanted to stop feeling pain and discomfort, if I stopped feeling this, everything could go back to "normal" I wanted it to heal now! And that need for immediacy, the urgency to return to a supposedly painless "normality" stayed with me for many years and only until some months ago life has invited me to question it and I have felt more open to receive this invitation: I feel how the experience and the concept of healing are taking on another shape and another meaning in me and I want to share it with you.
I don't know if this resonates with you, but I lived many years of my life firmly believing that, if I dared to explore any issue in my life that was making me uncomfortable, generating pain, or discomfort, it would be like tearing a band-aid off a wound that would later heal and close. Simple, isn't it?: I want to go from A to B, like a straight, precise and clear line. What a trick my naive mind was playing on me and the one sold to us by the society of immediacy in which we live! I want to recognize how protective this idea had been, it assured me the "control" over the results I wanted to achieve and therefore the security of holding in my hands the life I longed to live.
I did my first four years of therapy and closed my first process with the firm conviction that I was already "healed." I already knew my wounds and had found ways to close them. What hurt before, had stopped hurting, what used to generate intense fear, I was using it as a catalyst to move. I learned to navigate the world with more self-awareness and greater confidence in my own resources to access what I wanted. I felt self-reliant and powerful. I walked with certain pride, feeling that I knew more than other people about me, them, and life. And of course, my life wasn't perfect, I lived pleasant days and others not so much, but nothing critical or disruptive enough to question the vision I had of myself and the ground I was walking on.
After a pandemic and migrating voluntarily to a new country, the whole idea of healing as a destination, which I had supposedly arrived, was shattered into a thousand pieces, again and again. Those issues that I had worked on in my first therapeutic process and what I had learned felt insufficient to support me in my crisis and the cracks that were emerging. Not only was I visiting wounds that I thought I had closed, but now there were wounds that I was unaware they lived in me.
What a mess! Despite my reluctance to start a new process and ask for help, feeling overwhelmed in the face of uncertainty, my fears, numerous griefs that came along as part of emigrating, and other issues moved me to start another therapeutic process. This time, different borderline situations led me to look inward again, and I realized that I was walking down a spiral-shaped staircase. Before the pandemic I thought I was at the top of a lighthouse and after it, life invited me to go down, to look deep inside, to review issues that I had already reviewed with another perspective and form and to continue descending to find parts of myself that I was not aware I had.
The idealized image I had of myself began to fade. Descending the stairs was an act of courage to attend to what I did not know, to bring light to what I could not see in plain sight. Curiosity, the relationship I built with my therapist, and my own need to stop feeling uncomfortable, terrified, and in pain moved me at the time and continues to move me today. And I name the present because in the last three years that I've been looking inwards, I can recognize that giving space to my wounds is an ongoing process. I have learned new ways to relate to myself and the world, sometimes my automatic beats me and my old ways of dealing with certain situations take up all the available space and sometimes, I feel more space to try the new ways I am learning.
I'm still learning from myself, I'm still going down the stairs. Sometimes I stay for a long time on a step and choose to enjoy what is present in my life, at other times I feel that I want to go a little deeper. I name this with the intention to humanize ourselves and bring compassion, grace and acceptance to each of our processes. I no longer believe that there is a place to go where discomfort, displeasure and pain do not exist, where we are going to get perfect versions of ourselves that do not make mistakes, fear or suffer. What I do feel, and believe more strongly now, is that going through life has more to do with playing between inhabiting the versions of us that we like, and inhabiting the versions that we don't like: those where we can feel that we grow and expand and those where we contract and feel hopeless, helpless and small again.