the other side of healing.
We talk so much about healing. Still not enough, but it takes up an increasing amount of space. Healing, and trauma, healing justice.
But we don’t talk much about what it means to be healed.
When you’re in the struggle, it’s easy to romanticize both healing and being healed. Over there, across the horizon, I will be free from my trauma and my past and my struggles. Over there, I will transcend.
Maybe you didn’t come to a healing journey with the same romanticism that I did, and I don’t even think I knew at the beginning of my path how much I believed this fairytale concept of being healed.
I do know that I assumed healed people wore a lot of white linen pants, on which they never bled or spilled coffee.
I looked at people that I assumed were healed, and I made assumptions. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be something that frankly, is just not who I am. Someone softer, someone quieter.
Someone magical.
I would be lying if I don’t still know that my image of the healed person I want to be is mostly just adrienne maree brown. Ugh. So wonderful, poetic, so lush and just…seeming to float gently above it all.
This is, of course, without confirming with adrienne, not a realistic vision.
I started my healing journey after some deeply difficult periods in my life. Most notably, an experience of publicly calling out my boss for sexual harassment. That time did tremendous harm to me, distanced me from the community I’d known and loved and given so much of my life and energy to. Thankfully, I had some strong, wonderful people in my life, most notably my mentor at the time, Chaka, and my best friend Aisha to support me and help me find a new place in the world.
I started my job at Voices for Racial Justice and everything should have been wonderful. My new boss, Vina, was one of the softest, most kind, most supportive bosses you could imagine. Our workplace was ideal, full of light…we even had an office corgi named Susie. Our work was important, and it felt powerful to have my daily work directly connected to the movements for racial justice I was so passionate about.
But there was tension I couldn’t put my finger on. I wasn’t able to trust my coworkers, I was stressed beyond measure, and I didn’t know how to ask for help. Vina and I got into a fellowship hosted by the Rockwood Institute. And if you’ve been through Rockwood, you probably know what happened next. Through the work of the program, and some very telling 360 reviews from my peers and coworkers, I discovered that I needed to leave my job. I was not being a good coworker, and I didn’t know how to become the person I wanted to be again.
I had been exposed to the idea of somatic experiencing, through work a woman named Susan Raffo had done with Voices for Racial Justice. We talked a lot about the collective trauma that so many people, especially young people in our community were experiencing as we protested and shutdown highways and occupied buildings and fought for racial justice. I’d also read and worked with Resmaa Menakem, another important teacher and thought leader, talking about racial trauma in a historical sense, and the impact it has on us now. I feel so grateful that these two are both teachers who’ve given so much to our community in Minneapolis.
So when I left Voices for Racial Justice, I dove deep into doing my personal healing work with Susan. I saw her on a monthly, sometimes biweekly basis. I learned to connect with my body. I learned to feel where pain was happening in my body. I learned what it feels like when I shut down, why it happens, and what triggered it for me. I learned tools to help myself set boundaries, deal with obstacles, new ways to think.
I learned to listen to myself more, in all possible ways. I learned to feel more, to accept more of the things I experienced in the world around me. I got in touch with my inner woo, the parts that felt good to me but society had always told me were nonsense.
I’m not going to say much about what somatic experiencing is, or how it’s practiced, because I don’t have that training. But I will say this: through years of dedicated practice, reading, body work, and self-reflection, I have come to be a very different human being.
It’s been almost six years now. I live in another city, and I have a new somatic practitioner. And it’s just now that I am starting to feel something very different than what I’ve felt before, and the closest name I can put to it is just…freedom.
I’ve been feeling these things lately that I’ve struggled to describe: a clarity, an ease, a penchant for connection, a deeper empathy for people around me, a greater capacity to love my partner and my friends.
I explained this to Olivia, my practitioner now, and she said something like “when we get out of flight or fight mode, we have greater capacity for everything else.”
I said to her today “trauma feels like data now”, and I don’t know exactly how to explain this to you, but I feel free from my trauma without being disconnected from it. It is a part of my story. But it didn’t shape me, my response to it, the response from my loved ones and my community and the government and the world to greater traumas, that’s all part of the story—but I get to write the rest of it, for me.
Traumas have been impactful on me but I have agency. That isn’t said to put the onus on me to solve my own problems. Through somatics I have learned to not only feel what I am feeling, but how to ask for help, how to pause, how to receive body work that helps me feel or work through things.
No one gave me easy answers, but they taught me to help myself to get there.
I had this sort of revolutionary moment with Olivia when I came home from COP26 and explained an incredibly violent thing that had happened to me in Glasgow.
I told her what happened, how I felt in the moment, how I responded (walked to the river, called a friend, cried, went to get lunch with a friend after), and I said to her “how do I process this now in a way that this doesn’t get stored as another trauma?”
And she said to me… “You did it. You listened to yourself in the moment. You sought support. You processed it in the ways you needed to. You talked to me about it.”
And I realized I had felt nothing unusual as I talked about that moment of violence, as I explained it to her. My heart didn’t race, I didn’t shut down. The trauma was data. It was a story. It happened to me but it didn’t become me.
And I have never felt so free.
It’s important to say here that the title of this piece is a farce; there is no other side to healing. There is no healed/not healed border that you magically cross.
The best way I can describe what I feel now is just living. Living in a way that empowers me to not be stuck in cycles of repetition, stuck in reliving trauma and expecting new trauma, stuck in fight or flight, stuck between trying to protect myself and trying to heal myself.
I just feel like I can live. Bad things will happen, but I trust myself to know how to respond, and I know that sometimes I will not know how to respond, but I will always know how to ask for help.
The world is hard. Healing has to happen all the time.
But how do you receive that hurt?
How do you build a scaffolding for your heart? How do you know how to receive the love and joy and the support as well as you receive the pain, so there is a cushion for you when things are hard?
What are you feeling in your body, right now? I’m feeling a lightness in my chest. I’m feeling the sun on my face.
I hope you feel it too.
