False Starts and U-Turns
Day 3 Journal Series: What I Thought Healing Would Look Like
“You will keep meeting the same lesson in new clothes until you finally understand what it’s here to teach you.”
I used to think I was done healing every time the pain got quiet.
After a good therapy session. After setting a hard boundary. After three weeks of journaling and drinking my herbal tea like it was holy water, I’d feel clear again. Calm. Maybe even proud. I’d call it a breakthrough, tell my nervous system we made it, and exhale like the work was finally behind me.
Then something would happen.
A smell.
A silence.
A look I didn’t expect.
A feeling I hadn’t prepared for.
Then, suddenly, I was right back in it—triggered, defensive, doubting everything I thought I had processed.
That used to feel like failure. I would beat myself up, questioning why I wasn’t “further along.” I wondered what was wrong with me for circling back to the same grief, the same anger, the same ache I thought I buried years ago.
Now, I know better.
Healing does not move in straight lines. It loops. It spirals. It brings you back around to the same wound so you can see it differently - This time, with more compassion, with new language, and with a deeper understanding of who you are now versus who you were the first time it cracked you open.
There have been so many false starts in my journey. Moments I mistook for endings. Resolutions that were really just intermissions. Relief that felt permanent until it wasn’t, but here’s the truth:
Every U-turn has taught me something.
Every repetition deepened my capacity to heal with tenderness instead of urgency.
Every time I returned to the same lesson, I carried a little more wisdom into it.
I no longer chase closure like it owes me something. I make peace with the fact that some things may never feel fully resolved. Some wounds become part of my spiritual scar tissue. Not because I failed to fix them, but because I have learned to live honestly inside them.
The work of healing is not to never feel pain again. It is to know how to care for yourself when it returns. To recognize the terrain. To hold your own hand through it.
False starts are not proof that you’re failing. They are proof that you are still showing up.
Still softening.
Still staying.
Still becoming.
Your Turn:
What have your U-turns taught you? Where have you mistaken a pause for a finish line?
Stay messy,
Michelle S.
About the Author
Michelle is a mother, herbalist, educator, and sacred truth-teller. She writes for the women carrying too much and pretending too little—the ones healing in plain sight. Her blog Messy Truths & Sacred Roots is where she spills the raw, the real, and the holy work of unbecoming what the world demanded in order to remember who she truly is.