Let's Call It A Summer of Healing
On comfort, addiction, and participating in my own renewal
“I declare this to be the summer of healing.”
She said it on Voxer which is as official as it gets these days. I’m unsure if those were her exact words, but I took the gist and ran.
Last summer was a terrible one for Shannan for many different reasons, some she’s shared and some, I’m sure, she hasn't. But when she declared this to be the summer of healing, I co-declared it with her.
We’ve had our own string of terrible-ish months. Maybe a better word for it would be “dissonant.” The last 12 months have been some of the most dissonant of my whole life, from the highs of some incredible personal and professional milestones1 to the lows of navigating a difficult and confusing diagnosis with a loved one. Both have been all-consuming, together requiring all of my attention.
Many moments over the past year I have had the sense that I’ve not been responding so much as I have been reacting which, to me, is the difference between walking down the stairs and falling down headfirst. You may end up in the same place, but the experience is . . . different. And so are the injuries (or lack thereof).
Healing is a word I’ve been drawn to ever since Shannan mentioned it on Voxer all those months ago. Could this be all we’ve ever wanted, to be healed and whole?
But there are a lot of questions that come up for me. Do we have to wait for healing or is it something we fight for? Do we get to decide this will be the season we heal? How will we define it? How will we know if it’s true? Is there a such thing as past tense healed or will we ever and always be an active verb, in the process of the thing but never quite past it? How much agency to we have here anyway?
Healing sounds so good but also tends to take the long way home. This I would rather avoid.
When we are at the beginning of it, healing seems like a sparkly promised land.
But when we’re in the middle it can feel like a desert. We may not even knowing we’ve been in it until we’re almost through.
Sometimes healing feels like dying and that is not something they teach you at VBS and probably also not in med school.
I’d prefer comfort thankyouverymuch. Comfort shows up with handy sidekicks: distraction and avoidance. But healing brings annoying friends like honesty and endurance and my least favorite of all: grief.
Grief is an unmarked path in the forest, a raft in the ocean. It’s being asked to imagine a place where you feel most relaxed and nothing coming to mind. It’s thinking about it for two full weeks, wondering where you would feel the most safe, the most seen and held and okay, and finally you find it but it’s not a place, it’s a period of time in the past, before all the things, impossible to visit again. It’s letting go of one thing but not having the next thing to hold onto yet.
If grief is a ghost in a dark room, then healing is the light in the corner. It doesn’t make the ghost go away but it brings hope and vitality to a space where before there was only darkness.
It’s now mid-July which means summer is half-way over. Are we healing? How can we know? Here are some hopeful notes from a not-quite-so barren landscape, some practices I’m participating in as I discern my own next right thing.