#Healing Journey

Healing as Becoming, Not Returning Back

If healing is becoming, then grief often sits at the threshold. Letting go of the earlier self—healthier, more naive, more carefree—can feel like a genuine loss, and losses deserve mourning. People sometimes discover that what stalls them isn’t lack of effort but lack of permission to grieve what will not return. Once grief is allowed, energy frees up for new commitments and meanings. In that way, grief doesn’t contradict healing; it escorts it. You stop arguing with time and start cooperating with it, which is precisely how a “now” self begins to take shape. [...]

Turning Scars Into Flags of Hard-Won Progress

At first hearing, the image of a scar becoming a flag reframes pain as orientation: rather than a private blemish, it becomes a visible marker of distance traveled and ground won. Flags do two things at once—they signal where we are and rally others to a cause—so the metaphor invites us to treat past harm as both a milestone and a banner of belonging. Instead of erasing the past, it reorganizes it, converting injury into a coordinate for the self. In this sense, the line echoes Toni Morrison’s enduring preoccupation with memory and agency: progress is not measured by forgetting what hurt, but by carrying it with intention. Thus the journey’s map is drawn in healed tissue, and each mark, once a site of fragility, becomes a point of strength and orientation for what comes next. [...]

The Quiet Bravery Required for Healing

Acknowledging that we must ‘dig a little to find’ our courage recognizes the challenge involved. This metaphor evokes the image of miners searching for precious gems deep underground, implying that our bravery is a valuable resource that may require effort to retrieve. As Viktor Frankl describes in 'Man’s Search for Meaning' (1946), even in the darkest circumstances, human beings can summon inner resources they never knew existed. [...]