Healing, Spiraling

Healing isn’t linear; it’s a spiral. We like to imagine healing as a straight line.

Start here. Do the work. End there—whole, peaceful, finished.

But healing has never moved that way for me.

Healing is a spiral.

I circle back to places I’ve already been. Old wounds flare. Familiar fears whisper. Emotions I thought I had outgrown tap me on the shoulder and ask to be seen again. And for a long time, I believed that meant I was failing—that I wasn’t doing it “right,” that all the work I’d done somehow didn’t count.

But a spiral isn’t a step backward.

It’s a return with new eyes.

Each time I come back to the same pain, I’m standing a little higher than before. I notice things I couldn’t see the last time. I have language now where I once had silence. I have boundaries where I once had none. I have compassion where I used to carry only shame.

The spiral doesn’t mean the wound is winning.

It means the wound is loosening its grip.

Some days healing feels gentle—like soft light, like breath moving freely through my chest. Other days it feels raw and exhausting, like I’ve been dragged back into a storm I swore I’d already survived. Those days can be especially cruel, because they come with that familiar voice: Why am I still here? Why isn’t this over yet?

But healing was never meant to erase the past.

It was meant to teach me how to live alongside it without bleeding out.

The crow returns again and again—not because it is lost, but because it remembers. The flame flickers, dims, flares—never constant, never gone. Together they remind me that survival is not static. It moves. It shifts. It revisits.

If you find yourself back in a familiar place, be gentle with yourself. Ask not why am I here again? but what do I know now that I didn’t before?

You are not starting over.

You are deepening.

Healing is a spiral—and every turn means you are still moving, still learning, still alive.