From: Awa
To: Whomever it may concern
Welcome (back) to Healing Habits, a rubric that has attempted to feel like a written hug, though I’m never quite sure who I’m attempting to soothe more: you or myself. It’s a space to exhale, a brief detour through the mess and mercy of becoming.
The name itself feels ironic. A couple of years ago, someone asked me what my ‘healing habits’ were. I remember feeling weirdly stunned by the question, maybe even a little embarrassed by my inability to answer. I started this rubric as a way to find home within myself. Because isn’t that where we’re meant to belong? And yet, just like those resolutions that fade before February, my naive enthusiasm for making healing a habit slipped to the back of my mind, leaving only a faint fog. Clear-headed enough to ignore, heavy enough not to forget.
So, how do we do it?
How do we let healing live in our minds like brushing our teeth, a kind of mental hygiene that isn’t performative or punishing, but routine?
Six months into this year, I use this moment not to fix or perform, but to recalibrate. To shift.
To remind myself of who I am, or at least the kind of woman I want to become.
Honestly, I do know her. Or I’ve seen her in flashes. In the sunbeam that snuck through my curtains yesterday, in the voice that told me to keep going, in the mercy I’ve tried to show others, even when I’ve forgotten how to offer it to myself.
At the start of this year, I wanted to do things differently. No resolutions. No ripping myself to shreds in the name of progress. Just one vow: to move through life with gentleness, honesty, kindness, and love. Because truly, imagine not having a big heart. How lonely that would be.
And then life happened: tender, chaotic, fleeting.
And I did love. Gently. Honestly. Sometimes foolishly. I offered something soft of myself, and learned it’s not a weakness. It’s a refusal to let the world harden me.
But eventually the ease unraveled.
Suddenly, the roots I thought I had were nowhere to be found. I felt unearthed.
Is this what 24 feels like? Because some days I swear I’m 17 again, blinking through nebulous thoughts and distant clarity that my prefrontal cortex promised me.
This year has demanded growth from me in ways that feel raw and reluctant. I’ve had to scrub away cherished stains, things I once held close, because keeping them started to feel like a betrayal of myself. And that’s where the disarray set in.
So let me break this piece down the way I’ve been trying to make sense of my life lately:
A recalibration in three parts.
I.
There are days when I feel like a ghost in my own body. I blink myself open and wonder if I’m real. I ask myself why I’ve always felt like I needed fixing, and why the moment I get close to naming the fracture, I run. I obsess over the parts of myself that are easy to shame: my body, my output, my timelines, because the real wounds are harder to face.
The longing doesn’t leave.
Longing for closeness, for clarity, for something or someone to tell me it’s all going to make sense someday. I keep whispering that tenderness is not weakness. I try not to be ashamed of feeling deeply. But lately, I feel faint.
Still, I write. I reflect. I resist the urge to numb it all.
Because healing starts by naming the wound. Even if the words come out shaky.
II.
New year, blah blah.
You think Dry January is bad? Try quitting a person. Try deleting a shared future from your mental calendar. Try choosing yourself in a world that keeps demanding versions of you that aren’t yours. Try deciding to show up for yourself, even when it feels like a betrayal of what you once hoped for.
There’s a futility in trying to control anything.
I get that now.
Still, I’ve spent the past month fighting the fog, holding on to the thought: ‘Imagine I might become somebody someday.’ But for now, I’m here, trying to stay grounded in a fragile sense of gratitude and riding on a wave of delusional hope. Despair? That can wait. I’ve penciled it in for tomorrow.
And yet: I am unraveling.
Not in a dramatic way, just in the slow way, you don’t even notice until your foundation starts to feel unfamiliar. Until you forget the most basic things about yourself. Until you realize healing isn’t a destination, it’s a cycle. And lately, I’m caught in the rinse.
Because here’s what I’ve learned:
Healing doesn’t come in breakthroughs. It comes in glimmers.
It comes when you acknowledge your pain without letting it define you.
Rip the band-aid off. Let it breathe. Then decide what to do with it.
Healing isn’t about perfection. It’s about orientation.
Knowing where you are.
That’s where it starts.
III.
Recently, I looked up the definition of healing: ‘the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.’
It hit me.
I’ve been waiting for the outcome, for the ‘sound and healthy again’ part, when maybe I should’ve been learning how to commit to the process.
And processes require habits.
There’s this idea that something becomes a habit after doing it around 21 times. I’m not sure who counted or how, but the principle stands: you have to keep showing up. Again and again. Especially when you don’t feel like it.
But you still do, not because it’s easy or linear, but because at some point you start to trust that each small gesture adds up to something.
Not everything needs to be solved or even understood. Some things just need to be seen, acknowledged, lived through.
And maybe that’s where healing begins.
This half-year has been a lesson in that.
That joy and sadness are interlinked.
That rupture and beauty are not mutually exclusive.
I’ve been trying to stop obsessing over becoming and start noticing the small mercies of the present.
The perfect ray of sun.
The softness of a slow morning.
The fact that I always have more love to give, because love multiplies.
I close my eyes and feel my way back into the sunbeam.
And just like I told myself at the beginning of this godforsaken year:
You’ll never run out of love.
So, be generous with it.
Enjoy life with a vengeance.
With love,
A
