Nobody tells you what healing actually feels like. There's so much out there about how to heal, the practices, the tools, the routines, but very little about what it feels like when it's actually working. What it feels like in your body, in your days, in the quiet moments when you're not trying to do anything at all.
So I want to tell you. From the inside.
After my first real relationship ended I entered one of the hardest seasons I've known. Not because anything dramatic happened. Just the ordinary devastation of an ending. The kind where the days that follow are so unbelievably hard because you want to be fine, you're trying to be fine, & then the sunset looks exactly the way it did the day you went on that hike together. The air smells like afternoons spent sharing a cigarette in the backyard. & suddenly you're not fine at all. You're just trying to get through the day.
That's what grief in the body feels like. Not just sadness. Sensation. Memory stored in smell & light & the particular way a season feels on your skin. Your nervous system holding onto something your mind is trying to release.
For a long time, getting through the day was the whole goal. Not thriving, not healing in any visible way. Just making it to the other side of another twenty-four hours. & I want to say something about that, because I think we underestimate those days. We think they don't count because we're not doing anything profound in them. But they do count. They add up. Every single one of them.
Because one morning, & I couldn't tell you exactly when, because that's not how it works, I woke up & I wasn't angry anymore. I wasn't sad. I wasn't distracting myself or white-knuckling my way through another afternoon. I was just... being. Enjoying myself. Quietly, simply, fully present in my own life.
I hadn't noticed it happening. That's the thing about nervous system healing. It doesn't announce itself. There's no moment where you think today is the day I become okay. It's more like one day you realize you've been okay for a while & you just didn't stop to notice.
Here's what it actually felt like, in my body, when things started to shift.
The mornings got easier first. Not dramatically. Just a few seconds less of that heavy, dread-adjacent feeling before I was fully awake. Then I noticed I was less reactive. Things that used to send me spinning, a certain kind of silence, an unanswered message, a day with no plans, stopped pulling me under. I could feel the wave & not become it.
My body started to feel like mine again. I don't know how else to say it. There's a particular kind of dissociation that comes with grief & chronic stress, a feeling of living slightly outside yourself, watching your own days from a small distance. When that started to lift, I felt it physically. Like something settling back into place. Like the light was returning & I could feel it on my skin.
I started wanting things again. Small things at first. A specific meal, a walk at a certain time of day, the color pink. That last one sounds strange but it meant everything to me. I'd stopped wearing pink, stopped being drawn to it, without even realizing. & then one day it started calling me back. I started bringing it into my room, my wardrobe, my life. & I understood it as a signal. My softness was returning. My love for myself was coming back online.
I want to tell you the timeline because I think it matters. This took two years. Two years of pilates & breathwork & solo seasons & just getting through the days. There was no shortcut. There was no moment where I decided to heal & then healed. There was just the slow, quiet accumulation of days where I chose to come back to my body instead of running from it.
& then one morning I woke up & the anger was gone. The weight was gone. I was just there, in my own life, belonging to myself again.
If you're in the middle of it right now, the getting-through-the-days part, I want you to know those days are not wasted. Your nervous system is doing something in them even when it doesn't feel like it. Healing is happening in the ordinary moments, in the sunsets you survive & the mornings you get up anyway & the small choices you make to be a little gentler with yourself.
You won't notice it happening. & then one day you will.
If you want a gentle place to start, Remembrance is a free guide & a quiet return to yourself. & if you want to go deeper, The Soft Landing is a 7-day return for the woman who is tired of pushing her way through the hard moments & ready to actually come home to her body.
You're already closer than you think.
Stay close,
Jess