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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at MUJ chapter.

“Are you healed or perfectly distracted?”, I asked myself as I stood near the balcony overlooking the sparkling midnight near my hostel. I always treated my life like a project where you can only get “A” grades and never fail but it never quite happened that way. But isn’t that what life is? 

It puts you into the world, it crushes you, breaks you and tests you. It teaches you to feel, where, you learn to heal.

Healing sounds simple, right? 

You think you’ve got it all until you haven’t. Healing repeatedly makes you undo and redo all the feels until you shine.

Whenever I fell apart and fell into the rabbit holes of sadness and misery, I always thought if I occupied myself with enough tasks and hobbies, I’d be completely fine in no time. I realised I was completely fooling myself with the illusion of coping and healing when in reality I was just distracting myself a little too well. So, when the video game of my tasks and overpacked schedules hit a pause, all my feelings came crashing onto me. Whenever I treated healing like a game in which I could just win easily and “perfectly”, it ditched me with the bitter cold reality, the truth.

“The Path to Healing is Not Linear; it’s a Process”

Healing is more like climbing a mountain, it’s about enjoying the trek and the journey as much as you enjoy the view and the destination. It’s about learning the ups and downs and letting the rain drench you. Healing might be a tough tide, it can be tricky, it can seem hard, but you’re just a human navigating through life. Having the courage to admit that it does get hard and that not everything is as easy as it seems, is the first step to embark on this beautiful journey. It’s all about acceptance and embracing that you’re a human. Accepting that you’ll go through phases and breakdowns, but you’ll also go through glow-ups and sunshine. Even though it never comes with a “how to” guidebook, it does teach you to create your own. It teaches you to rediscover your inner shine and rejuvenate your soul and mind when misery corrodes you. One caution it does come with is never to ignore yourself and your heart because that is where the death of healing occurs.

But why do you even need healing, right?

Why do you even need to navigate through the passageways of your heart to reach the golden door of sunflowers and sunshine?

Healing is needed for you to become better, not the best. It’s needed for you to be good rather than perfect and for you to evolve rather than hurt yourself. 

“If you never heal from what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you”

-Tamara Kulish

Healing is always better than hurting in the same place and environment. It’s always better to prioritise your heart and healing rather than comparing yourself with the glittering shimmers of someone else’s life. It’s always easier to hurt than heal. But you need to choose what’s better over what’s easier.

I never knew how much I needed healing, and how much I needed to learn about who I am, and how I feel. But slowly, I started to learn the hard way, and even though I’ve not quite reached the destination yet, I can wholeheartedly agree that I love the journey way more.

So, the next time, you feel like you want to heal, start by accepting that you’re human. Seek help when needed, you’re never any weaker or shorter by admitting that you’re hurt or that you’re having a hard time.

“When I stand before thee at the day’s end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.”

– Rabindranath Tagore

I can tell you all about the beauty of life and how beautiful the destination after evolving and healing is but it’s about embracing the rough, vulnerable journey of it that I want you to understand.

“We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”

— Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Healing and life are all about appreciating both sides of the coin. You cannot appreciate the sunshine if you don’t love the rain that came before it. Ignorance of self can hurt you way more than dealing with the hurt. 

The journey of healing can make you love a lot that you didn’t before, it can make you be at the lowest but it can even get you to the higher end of the slope. 

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

– Rumi

At the end of the day, that is what life and its lessons are, you heal, you learn, you love.

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Shreeya Srivastava is a chapter editor at HerCampus MUJ chapter. She loves writing about life and the complexity of human emotions, style and to spread awareness about issues which hide in plain sight. Beyond HerCampus, Shreeya is a big advocate for women in stem and gender equality. She is a KodeWithKlossy two year alumni. She loves Robotics and AI. On the academic front, she is currently pursuing a bachelor's degree of Bachelor's of Computer Applications specialising in Data Science. Shreeya is an introvert and loves singing and songwriting. She believes that words have the power to turn your worst emotions and your misery into something beautiful. She believes that nothing in life is mundane if you seek beauty in it. She writes all types of content be it poetry, songs, stories or articles. She also loves reading and her favourite author is Sylvia Plath. In her free time, Shreeya can be seen jotting down a myraid of metaphors and symbolisms to combine into poetry in her diary. She loves listening to music and her top artists are- Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Gracie Abrams and Fleetwood Mac.