Healing is Boring, And That’s a Good Thing
I Thought Healing Would Feel Like a Movie Montage
When I started doing the work, I genuinely thought there’d be a big moment. A scene. Some sort of cinematic breakthrough where I’d sob on a therapist’s couch, see the face of god, and emerge a completely new woman with better skin and a calmer nervous system. I was expecting trumpets. I was expecting a soft focus glow up. I was expecting to feel different in a way you could photograph.
Spoiler. That’s not what happened. There were no trumpets. There was no slow motion walk into a new life with a wind machine and a strings section. There was just me, slowly noticing that the things which used to wreck me for a week were now wrecking me for an afternoon. Then an hour. Then sometimes not at all. Quiet little shifts that nobody else could see, including, often, me.
I’ve not lived a calm life, babe. Unhealthy relationships, a complicated history with wine, binge eating I used to call “just my appetite,” and an Olympic level talent for running away from anything that needed to be looked at directly. For years I thought that was just my personality. Impulsive. Intense. A little self destructive. Turns out a lot of what I was calling personality was actually just a nervous system doing the best it could with what it had. And the work to undo that? Has been the most beautifully boring decade of my life.
The Highlight Reel Lies About Healing
We’ve been sold this idea that healing is dramatic. That there’s a single magical conversation, a retreat in Bali, a journal prompt that cracks you open like a coconut, and suddenly you’re free. The girlies on the internet talk about it in voiceovers over slow pans of matcha lattes and linen sheets. It’s aesthetic. It’s tidy. It has a soundtrack.
Real healing is none of that. Real healing is realising, on a Tuesday, that you didn’t text the person you absolutely would have texted three years ago. It’s noticing that the comment from your boss didn’t spiral you into a shame cyclone for the rest of the week. It’s catching yourself reaching for an old coping mechanism and choosing, almost begrudgingly, to do the slightly less satisfying thing instead. These moments are not photogenic. There is no reel. There is no soundtrack. There is just you, quietly choosing differently, again and again, with absolutely no applause.
And here’s the bit that nobody warns you about. When the drama goes, you have to actually meet yourself. You don’t get to hide behind the chaos anymore. You don’t get to point at the latest crisis and say, well, of course I’m a mess, look at this. The crisis stops arriving on schedule. The phone stops buzzing with disasters. And in that silence, you have to figure out who you are when nothing is on fire. Which, honestly, is more confronting than any breakdown I’ve ever had.
Peace Felt Suspicious At First
I want to be honest about something. The first time my life got genuinely calm, I hated it. I thought something was wrong. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, refreshing my own life like a feed, scanning the horizon for the next disaster. My nervous system was so used to running on adrenaline that an ordinary Wednesday felt like a glitch in the matrix. Where’s the chaos. Where’s the panic. Where’s the thing I need to manage.
Because here’s the truth, when you’ve been raised on intensity, peace doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like waiting. It feels like the eerie quiet before a storm in a film. Your body keeps bracing for impact because that’s what it knows. You sit on your couch with Lulu chewing on your toes and you think, surely something is about to go horribly wrong, because nothing is going horribly wrong, and that in itself is suspicious.
It took me a long time to understand that this is the work. The discomfort of calm isn’t a sign that something is missing. It’s a sign that something has finally stopped happening to you. The absence of crisis isn’t emptiness, it’s recovery. It’s your body learning, very slowly, that not every quiet moment is the prelude to a catastrophe. And once you sit with that long enough, the suspicion starts to soften, and you start to trust the quiet a little more each day.
The Glamour of an Unremarkable Tuesday
Healing, in practice, is staggeringly unsexy. It’s going to bed at a reasonable hour because you’ve learned that staying up overthinking doesn’t actually solve anything, it just gives you bags and bad decisions. It’s drinking a green tea instead of pouring a third glass of wine because you’ve clocked that future you always pays the bill for past you’s emotional regulation strategy. It’s leaving the message on read because you finally understand that not every text deserves a response, and certainly not at 11pm.
It’s saying no to the thing that would have once felt thrilling, because you can now feel the cost of it before you’ve even said yes. It’s noticing that you’re hungry instead of dissociating and then panic eating at 9pm. It’s catching yourself mid spiral, putting the phone down, and going outside to look at a tree for thirty seconds like some sort of unhinged Victorian poet, except not, because we don’t do Victorian anything. It’s ordinary, repetitive, slightly tedious choices that nobody throws a party for.
But stack enough of those Tuesdays together and something magical happens. You look up one day and your life is just… nice. Calmer. More honest. Less full of people and habits that drained you. You haven’t had a meltdown in months. You can eat a meal without it being a moral event. You can be alone with your own thoughts without needing to drown them out. There is no big before and after photo. There is just a slow, quiet accumulation of evidence that you are not who you used to be. And babe, that is the entire prize.
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do Is Be Steady
The biggest lie we’ve been told is that an exciting life is the same thing as a meaningful life. That if it isn’t loud, intense, and slightly unhinged, it isn’t real. I lived inside that lie for a long time. I confused chaos with passion. I confused volatility with chemistry. I confused exhaustion with depth. I thought if I wasn’t suffering or scheming or recovering from something, I wasn’t really living.
I’m not saying I’ve become a Zen creature who floats serenely through life in linen. I’m an elder millennial chaos goblin and that energy isn’t going anywhere. I will still rage in my kitchen. I will still wear a dramatic heel. I will still have feelings about people who don’t deserve my feelings. But the difference now is that the chaos lives in my outfits and my opinions, not in my actual nervous system. The drama is curated. The peace is structural.
If you’re in the middle of it right now, in the boring bit, in the quiet bit, in the bit where you’re half convinced healing isn’t working because nothing is happening, this is your reminder. Nothing happening is the something. The non event is the event. You are not stuck, you are not behind, you are not boring. You are simply becoming a version of yourself who doesn’t need to set her own life on fire to feel alive. And honestly, that’s the most radical, devastating, gorgeous thing a woman can do. Stay. Settle. Be steady. Let it be a little boring. That’s where the real life has been hiding the whole time.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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