What Offline Healing Looks Like

I saw these words tattooed on the brilliant Jennifer Pastiloff, and knew those were the words I wanted and needed on my body forever. A couple years later, I’m happy to say they’re no longer aspirational.

Maybe healing is maxing out your credit card so you can puke your guts out at an ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica, or TikTok quitting your corporate job to live that #vanlife, or smashing the patriarchy by going braless under your crunchy jumpsuit made from 100% organic, fair-traded hemp.

But it’s never been that for me.

It’s been going to the beach in a bikini, not as an exercise in body positivity, but to feel the ocean on more of my skin.

Not responding to the casual text from the brother who, months ago, demanded I call him Mr. LastName. My body didn’t start shaking, my brain didn’t wonder if I was crazy. That glassy, crystal pool inside of me just calmly whispered:

Nope.

My healing is a no thank you to cold plunges and ice baths and freezing showers although the whole world disagrees with me.

It’s crying into my sweat while lifting and pushing and pulling and slamming heavy things at the gym every day for eight months until I can pull myself up on the bar for the first time in my life. It’s being excited to hold a full coffee pot without shaking and not being embarrassed that this is how I measure my strength.

It’s accepting the sacred nature of bathroom floors and the tears dripping down my face onto cool tiles in steamy air.

Accepting reality even when I don’t like it, even when it cracks me right down the middle and I can’t breathe and I can’t move and I think I might die.

But then I don’t die.

And I ask love to please pull the splintered parts back together because I can’t. And love, miraculously, magically, does pull my parts back together, allowing me to feel soft and whole in a world that‘s often shattered and sharp.

I keep going back to the gym with the pick-up trucks in the parking lot and the flag shirts on every back and the people I would not be friends with but love because I’ve seen them cry into their sweat, too.

The one recovering from breast cancer and the one with the prosthetic leg.

The one who wants kids and can’t have them but holds everyone’s baby so tenderly.

The one who comes in expensive leggings, a full face of make-up, and a blow-out.

The one who let it slip that he wanted to get big because he was always scared as a kid.

Finally feeling my pain helps me see theirs. And it softens me, makes me turn toward, instead of averting my eyes.

Knowing I have an abyss inside of me that will swallow people whole and not looking away allows me to hold other people, too. I sit still in the presence of despair regulating my own discomfort, I allow all the tears without a single word of advice, I hold a shaking hand and pull a crumpled body close.

I’m not afraid to fall into your abyss because I know about mine.

I’m finally brave enough to say to a person, hey, I like you, do you want to be friends? Even if they might think I’m crazy. Or maybe just don’t like me.

Which is no longer the worst thing that could ever happen.

The worst thing is being so scared that I miss out on a connection with a funeral friend. The lifelong kind. Where maybe their eulogy or my eulogy won’t go viral, but should because it is dripping with truth and love.

Healing is noticing when I’m numb and overwhelmed and sometimes I binge the show or eat the sugar or add to cart or take the drug.

But when I do, I don’t hate myself (usually).

I talk to myself with my hand on my heart, eyes closed. No longer ashamed that I need kindness, especially now, which allows me

More often than not

To write through it, to open up a tiny space to make a different choice.

So, I go to the basement to push against the wall as hard as I can until the tears come. I scream in the car, that one song on repeat 11 thousand times. I call the friend, and say: I really, really need you. Do you have ten minutes…or maybe two hours?

I still drink the coffee. Always with so much creamer that I have to reheat the mug in the microwave. But I also drink the water.

I smooth the lotion on myself gently, no hurry, no pulling on stretch-marked skin as if I’m already impatient with myself just for standing there.

I hold myself tightly. I say, yes, actually, I would love a fuzzy blanket and a warm cup of peppermint tea with honey, thank you.

I go to therapy when it’s uncomfortable and do breathwork that gives me crampy lobster hands and paint paintings that will never hang in a gallery and dance around in my underwear to music I don’t ever remember the words to, which, honestly, is probably for the best.

But mostly, I stand in front of the mirror and look into my own eyes and tell myself:

I got you.

I got you.

I got you.

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