The Space Between Healing and Living
A realistic journey from survival, to stability, to building a life that actually feels like mine.
Lately, I’ve been doing something I never thought I’d be capable of.
I’ve been choosing discomfort on purpose.
Not in the self-destructive way I used to — but in a quieter, more intentional way.
I’m putting myself in rooms where I don’t quite feel ready. I’m saying yes to things that stretch me. I’m sharing more of myself. I’m building something that matters to me without having a perfect map.
And what surprises me most isn’t the discomfort. It’s that I don’t collapse in it anymore. There’s still doubt. Still fear. Still moments where my mind tries to pull me back into old patterns. But underneath that, there’s something steadier now.
And if you had met me ten years ago, I don’t think you would have recognised that version of me at all.
In my early twenties, my life felt chaotic in a way that is hard to explain unless you’ve lived it.
Not glamorous chaos. Not exciting or freeing — just unstable.
I told myself I was just having fun.
That the drinking, the drugs, the impulsive decisions, the way I moved through relationships — that it was all part of being young. That it made me feel more normal. More like everyone else. More like someone who could keep up with life.
But if I’m honest, a lot of it was coping.
Coping with a mind that felt loud and unpredictable. Coping with emotions that felt too big for my body. Coping with a sense that I didn’t quite know how to be a person in a steady, grounded way.
I didn’t have language for any of that at the time. I just knew that when I was left alone with myself, things didn’t feel good. So I found ways to not be.
And when your main way of moving through life is avoiding yourself, things tend to get messy.
Looking back, I can also see that I wasn’t taking much accountability then — not in a harsh, blame-yourself way, but in the sense that I didn’t believe I had much agency.
Life felt like something that happened to me. My mind felt like something that happened to me. My emotions felt like something that happened to me.
And when you live like that for long enough, you start to feel almost separate from your own life — like you’re being carried somewhere you didn’t choose, without fully believing you can change direction.
By my mid-to-late twenties, that mess had caught up with me.
I had my first real mental breakdown. Psychotic episodes. Periods where my mind felt like it had completely turned against me. Where reality didn’t feel stable. Where I didn’t feel like someone who could function in the world in any kind of consistent way.
And as much as some might mark this as the pivotal turning point — the moment I got my shit together and turned it all around — it wasn’t.
Or at least, it didn’t feel like it.
It was one of the hardest chapters of my life.
Not just the breakdown itself. Not even the part where I started to stabilise a little.
But the stretch that came after that — where I was technically functioning again…
but still struggling just to get through the day.
My anxiety and depression were still running everything.
I would take time off work just to try and manage it. Then go back in, trying to hold it together, only to have an anxiety attack or completely unravel — which would often lead to weeks, sometimes months, of falling back into a low.
It felt like I was constantly starting over. And underneath all of that was a deep sense of shame.
Shame that I couldn’t cope. Shame that I couldn’t function the way other people seemed to. Shame that something so simple — like going to work, or simply getting through a day — felt so hard for me.
From the outside, it didn’t always look that bad.
People around me often thought I was okay. Maybe just a bit stressed. Maybe a bit emotional. Maybe even a little dramatic.
But internally, it felt like I was fighting my own mind just to exist inside my life.
And the more I struggled, the more I pulled back. The more I withdrew. The more I hid what was actually going on. The more I told myself I just needed to get it together.
I spent a long time in that cycle.
Trying. Failing. Shutting down. Starting again.
I started to believe that I was fundamentally broken.
Not just struggling. Not just someone who had been through things, or developed messy coping patterns, or had a nervous system under strain.
Broken.
I had diagnoses. Big, heavy words. Words that explained things, yes — but also became identities in my mind.
At some point, those labels stopped feeling like information and started feeling like a verdict. Every bad day meant something. Every spiral meant something. Every difficult emotion confirmed the story.
See? This is who you are.
You are unstable.
You are damaged.
You are too far gone to build the kind of life you actually want.
And there is something particularly hopeless about believing that your suffering is not just something you’re experiencing, but something you are.
Because when you think the problem is who you are, it becomes very hard to imagine change. Very hard to imagine responsibility without shame. Very hard to imagine a future that doesn’t look like a more polished version of survival.
I really did believe, for a long time, that some people were built for life and I simply wasn’t one of them.
There were years where work felt almost impossible. Where my mind felt full of internal negative chatter. Where the way I spoke to myself was so harsh and constant that it just sounded like me. Where depression, stress and anxiety were not occasional visitors but conditions I seemed to live inside.
I identified with the chaos. I identified with the pain. I thought that was just my nature.
And then, somewhere along the way, something shifted.
Not in a big, obvious way. Not even in a way that felt empowering at first.
I started becoming more aware. And strangely, it made things seem heavier.
Because now I could see my patterns more clearly. I could see that I was struggling. I could see the ways I was contributing to my own suffering, the ways I was spiralling, the ways I felt different from people who seemed to move through life more easily.
But instead of that awareness turning into compassion or empowerment, it turned into self-blame.
When I first started trying to change, I brought that same mindset with me.
I didn’t gently support myself into healing. I tried to force it.
I judged the thoughts in my head. I got angry at myself for still feeling bad. I tried to suppress emotions because I thought having them meant I was failing. I thought if I were doing healing properly, I would become happy — and stay that way.
I believed every setback meant I was back at the beginning.
Even my healing had pressure in it. And when it didn’t “work” quickly, I used that as more evidence that I was beyond help.
It took a long time to realise that I wasn’t failing at healing.
I was just approaching it in the only way I knew how — through control, urgency, and self-criticism.
Real healing turned out to be slower than that.
It was more repetitive and not at all glamorous.
It looked like learning to observe my thoughts instead of becoming them. It looked like gradually becoming the watcher. It looked like noticing the cruelty of my inner voice and gently, sometimes clumsily, offering something softer. It looked like allowing myself to have low points without making them mean everything. It looked like measuring progress not by whether I struggled, but by how quickly I could come back.
There was no big breakthrough moment. Just small, repeated returns.
And it wasn’t one thing — it was a combination. Books, practices, movement, journalling, breathwork. Repetition. Letting things be unsexy and cumulative.
That shift took time. Years, really, before I could feel anything changing in a meaningful way.
Over time, my inner landscape became less violent.
That doesn’t mean life suddenly became easy.
It means there was more space inside me. More ability to pause. More moments where I could see what was happening without instantly being swallowed by it. More capacity to support myself instead of immediately turning against myself.
And eventually, something else happened that mattered just as much… I started noticing evidence.
Evidence that I was not incapable. Evidence that I was not lazy. Evidence that I was not doomed to under-function forever.
When I landed a new job and was working from home, something opened up for me. I was in an environment where I could regulate more easily. I could take better care of my mental and physical health. I had more space, more control over my day, and more room to support myself rather than constantly override myself.
I thrived there. And that mattered more than it might sound.
Because for someone who had spent years feeling like she could barely function, doing well in that environment didn’t just feel like an achievement. It felt like a correction.
Maybe I wasn’t broken.
Maybe I had needed the right conditions.
Maybe capability had been in me all along.
That period changed my self-concept.
After that, things became noticeably more stable.
And for a while, that felt like a great achievement with everything I had been working toward.
But eventually, something unexpected crept in. Things felt… dull.
Not disastrous. Not dramatic. Not deeply painful. Just flat.
And that confused me, because for so long, feeling okay had been the goal. Stability had been the dream. I thought once I got there, I would feel relieved forever.
Instead, I found myself in a strange in-between.
Safer, yes.
Healthier, yes.
More self-aware, definitely.
But also a little under-alive.
At first I thought that meant I was doing something wrong. That maybe I had missed something along the way. But eventually I realised the flatness wasn’t a failure.
It was a threshold.
Because I had spent so many years trying to feel okay, I hadn’t really asked myself what came after that.
What happens when you’re no longer in crisis — but you’re also not fully alive?
That question changed everything.
Because I started to realise that healing is not the end of the story.
Healing matters deeply. It gave me a foundation. It gave me tools. It gave me space. But at some point, if we’re not careful, healing can become another place we stay. Another way of waiting. Waiting until we feel ready. Waiting until we feel confident. Waiting until we feel like the version of us who is allowed to begin.
But the version of me I was waiting for wasn’t coming fully formed. She was going to be built in motion.
That is where this current season really began.
The season I now think of as my gentle growth era.
Especially over the last year, I’ve been meeting new versions of discomfort. Not the discomfort of chaos or collapse — but the discomfort of expansion.
The discomfort of being visible. Of trying things I don’t feel fully ready for. Of entering new spaces. Of wanting more.
And I’ve noticed something interesting.
These newer edges still bring up fear. Procrastination. Perfectionism. The urge to delay until I feel more ready. But now I can see those patterns with more clarity.
I can see that procrastination is often just delay dressed up as preparation. That perfectionism adds extra steps and calls itself responsibility. That sometimes what I think is a need for motivation is actually a need for grounding.
That is the difference now.
I no longer expect growth to feel comfortable. But I also no longer believe discomfort automatically means danger. Because now, when I reach an edge, I’m not empty-handed.
I have tools. I know how to regulate. I know how to return to what steadies me. I know how to support myself through the stretch instead of abandoning myself the moment something feels hard.
And that, to me, is what gentle growth really is.
Not growth without fear. Not a soft life that never asks anything of you. Not healing as a way of staying small.
Gentle growth is learning how to stretch your capacity without abandoning yourself in the process.
It’s choosing courage, then returning to care. It’s building readiness in motion. It’s letting healing and expansion move together.
I don’t see myself as something to fix anymore.
I see myself as someone to support. Someone to listen to. Someone to challenge, gently. Someone worth building a life with. And that feels far more powerful than becoming some polished, perfected version of myself ever could.
Because this version is real.
She knows what it is to feel broken — and not be. She knows what it is to survive. She knows what it is to slowly rebuild an inner world. She knows what it is to realise that safety, while beautiful, is not the same thing as living to your full potential.
She is not finished. But she is here. Still showing up. Still moving forward, even on the days it feels harder than it should.
And maybe that’s what I want this space to be.
Not a place where I pretend to have it all figured out. Not a place where I only share the polished version of growth or the end result. But a place where I can tell the truth about what it actually looks like to move from survival… to steadiness… to something more like aliveness.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of your own version of this — still healing, still figuring it out, still not quite where you want to be — just know this:
You are not behind. You are not broken beyond repair. And you don’t have to wait until you’re perfect to begin building something meaningful.
You can start from here. With the version of you that exists right now. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
Healing didn’t fix me. It gave me the foundation to become someone I actually want to be.
And I think I’m only just getting started.
