Healing

     With the new year just around the corner, I've been reflecting a lot lately and thinking about how I want to live and the things I want to focus on in 2018. I always talk about managing symptoms and coping and self care because those things are super important. I realized that I don't really talk about another important piece of the wellness puzzle: healing.
     I remember when I first got diagnosed with OCD, I made an appointment to talk to my priest at the suggestion of my therapist. I explained everything to my priest, and I even took some printouts explaining everything. One of the first things my priest said to me was, "You need healing." He said it matter-of-factly, like it wasn't a big deal, like it didn't even occur to him that I might deserve all the suffering I had been putting myself through. He said it like he believed healing was a real possibility. I was practically floored by the idea.
     That statement and the idea of healing has stuck with me over the last couple of years as I've muddled my way through coping and self care to try to figure out exactly what healing looked like for me. I had only ever thought of surviving, not legitimately healing and overcoming. But there the idea was.
     I didn't really understand what my priest was talking about when he said I needed healing. It took me a while to  realize that healing was different from just managing symptoms and getting back to my pre-OCD life, but I couldn't figure out what healing would look like for me or even if I would ever be able to get to a point that could be considered as "healing" from the trauma I caused myself through for all those years. I didn't even know if I would recognize the true, deep soul-healing process that I knew I needed and desperately wanted.
     Then I was writing the other night, and as I read over my writing, I realized that I was no longer thinking of my OCD as a cage that trapped me or a demon that I had to fight against to make my way out of the darkness that had become my mind. I no longer thought of myself as somebody who wasn't really worth saving. I had, at some point over the past year, started to think of myself as someone worth saving, and I thought of my OCD as just as piece of myself that I had finally accepted and made friends with, if you will, so I could let the good things back into my life again. I no longer thought of my soul as broken, and that meant that I was able to believe that I wasn't broken. I looked back at some of my other writings, and sure enough, among the darker pieces of the past year, some writings about recovery and redemption were mixed in as well.
     It was then that I finally realized, after two years, what healing looked like for me. Healing looked like grace, redemption, and love that I deserved in my own eyes after all that time of believing that I didn't. To heal, I had to find grace and redemption in my own eyes because, at that moment, that was the most important thing..to change the way I saw myself. It doesn't really matter how positively the world sees you if all you can see is negative, so I had to finally start seeing myself in a positive way before healing could begin. Healing looked like honestly believing that I deserved good things because humans are basically good and that means they deserve a good life with happiness and love and friends. So, for 2018, I want to try to focus on the healing piece of my wellness and hoping for good things in my life.
     I'll end with this: Healing is so important to wellness, and healing looks different for everyone. To me, it seems like healing begins when you change the way you see yourself from negative to positive. Don't give up just because you think you won't ever reach that point or that you can't ever change the way you see yourself. We can all get there. We all deserve healing and love and happiness.