There often comes a point in the healing process where you can no longer tell if you’ve truly moved on, or if you’ve just mastered not looking back.
You stop talking about the thing that hurt you. You stop checking in on it, stop naming it, stop bringing it into rooms where it no longer seems to belong. And for a while, that silence feels like peace, like hope. You convince yourself that because you’re not aching over it anymore, you must be healed.
But healing isn’t always the absence of pain, and avoidance has a way of disguising itself in ways we least expect it to, in ways we cannot express.
Sometimes we don’t move on — we just move forward. We get back to work. We say yes to motivating plans. We fill our calendars. We keep ourselves in motion. But in the quiet moments, in the unguarded spaces, the ache still makes itself known. It takes the shape of a name spoken too casually, or a memory that resurfaces, or a corner of your heart you realize you’ve kept off-limits even from yourself.
And that’s when you start to ask yourself — “Am I really healing, or am I just surviving?”
This space is tender, it’s disorienting, and it’s more common than most human beings like to admit. At the end of the day, avoidance is easier than facing what hasn’t been resolved. It asks less of us. It feels like control. But the hard truth is that what we refuse to name often refuses to leave, to heal. Unprocessed pain doesn’t just vanish — it finds quieter corners to live in.
This is not a call to dig up everything you’ve ever buried. This is not an invitation to rip yourself open in the name of healing properly or perfectly. This is a gentle reminder that you do not have to fear what is still tender inside of you. You do not have to rush your way into wholeness. God is not impatient with your process. He is not measuring your progress by how composed you seem or how many days it has been since you last fell apart.
Healing is not linear. It is not not always obvious. Sometimes, the real breakthrough comes when you stop trying to prove that you’ve moved on and instead allow yourself to be honest about where you are. You are allowed to feel the weight of what happened. You are allowed to still have questions. You are allowed to be in progress.
You may not know if you’re in a season of healing, or a season of surviving — but the fact that you’re asking means that something has shifted. Something in you wants the truth more than you want the comfort of numbness. That desire, however small, however quiet — is sacred.
God doesn’t need you to have the full answer. He just needs your permission to meet you in the middle of the unknown — and he will, every single time.
