You Have To Give Yourself Time To Heal

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Let me tell you something about moving on: It takes time. A shit ton of time. It sucks, I know. If you want to be OK again, you need to be patient and let it take its course.

The process of moving on is a gut wrenching one. You want so desperately for this thing to stop consuming you. You’d pay any amount of money; do anything you could to just stop being sad about it. Then you remember it doesn’t work that way.

You can’t flip a switch and be over something that hurts you as much as it does. You need to just do it the only way there is: the long way.

If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m impatient. So for me, waiting for time to pass and the wounds to heal fully sucks and is extremely difficult. Along with that, moving past something takes a lot of mental energy. It’s an emotionally draining process to work on being okay again. So when I sense that I’m making progress and I’m finally moving on, I develop this mentality of “I’m okay now, I don’t need to work on moving on any more. I can be normal again.”

I can finally say that tonight I realized you can’t do that. When you break a bone, you can’t take off the cast just because it doesn’t hurt as much anymore. That’s not the way healing works. Healing is only effective when you give yourself the time for it to work. You have to work on getting better every single day even after you think you’re okay. If you don’t, I’m telling you that you’re going to regress. It’s inevitable.

If you’re a recovering alcoholic, going back to a bar even after being sober for a month is extremely difficult. You think, “It’ll be fine, I’ll be okay.” But you can’t help but fall for some kind of temptation. You have a higher chance of relapsing and will wake up tomorrow with an abundance of regret. Your hard work, consistency, progress, all gone in one night. The only thing worse than being on rock bottom is being back at rock bottom after you found a way out.

You deserve to be happy. Not happy on the surface, not “sort of happy,” but genuinely and completely happy.

You’ll never get there if you don’t give yourself the time to get there. I know you want so desperately to be okay again, but it doesn’t happen over night. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you won’t be fixed in one either. That’s okay. One day you will be okay again. When you are, you’ll appreciate it so much more because you know how long it took for you to get there.

Work on yourself every day. Get up. Shower. Wear your best clothes and leave the house looking damn good. Devise a plan for the day and do not come back home until you have achieved it. Do something that makes you happy and is just for you. Focus on improving yourself. Tell yourself how awesome you are. Be thankful. Smile. Get sleep. Wake up tomorrow and repeat.