Healing Isn’t a Journey.

The phrase “healing journey” has a shiny online glow. It has surface-level appeal.
It’s neat, motivational, Instagram-polished. And for some people, that phrasing helps them survive.
Fine. But let’s not kid ourselves, what saves one person doesn’t automatically speak for everyone else. Pretending it does turns comfort into a weapon.
That neatness is also its curse. Healing isn’t neat.
Reducing healing to a “journey” gives the illusion of progress where there might be none, and it risks shaming people who don’t feel like they’re moving forward.
The phrase works well as a fridge-magnet, or a decent TikTok offering, especially when sad, watery eyes and a quivering lip add to the punch for reeling in likes.
But it fails as an honest description of the messy despair that’s really going down. And yes, for some people, “journey” language does help them survive. But let’s not mistake survival props for universal truth.

I thought of restoration. Picture an old engine block. You don’t place it in the back of a pickup truck, send it down the road, and call that “restoration.” You’d be laughed out of the garage. Real restoration means disassembling, cleaning, sanding, replacing, refitting, sometimes for weeks or months. It’s dirty, slow, and precise. To call the transportation of an engine block a “restoration journey” is absurd. And it’s just as absurd to call the messy, unpredictable process of human healing a neat little journey.

During some of my worst moments, I went for walks. Moving my legs took all the courage I could summon. But I never said, I’m going out to heal. Nope, I went for walks. Sometimes, healing happened, and sometimes it didn’t. So what is healing, actually? It isn’t a straight road or an HR checklist.
Healing is the body dragging itself back together in its own time, sometimes helped by our choices, sometimes not.
It’s a mix of movement and stillness, of sleeping and walking, of breakthroughs and setbacks. It’s wildly diverse: no two people heal the same way, and no single prescription works for everyone.
Healing isn’t linear, it’s a shifting landscape.
That’s why I chose to retire the phrase “healing journey” altogether. Alternatives like “walking the mess,” “living through repairs,” or even “one helluva tough step at a time” at least acknowledge my reality instead of covering it with a shiny Instagram-ready manifesto.

My healing has never been a journey. It’s a landscape, filled with setbacks and small victories, and some pretty cool scenery, if I’m lucky.
Each person navigates that landscape differently. To respect that diversity is to respect the truth of what healing really is.
Earlier this Sunday, I went for a walk to quiet the anxiety, then drove for a while to clear my head.
Those weren’t milestones on a road, they were paths across my own rough terrain. Not progress. Not a journey. Just one more way of moving through the landscape.
For me, there’s no map, no neat path, no inspirational hashtag. Healing, for me, is walking, laughing, crying, and cursing while surviving the wreckage day after day.