“Time heals” is a common saying, but its truth is more complex than it seems. Healing is often described as something gradual and linear, which you may achieve over the course of time. It is often perceived that if you wait long enough, try hard enough, and stay strong, you will eventually heal.
Is it really that simple? People often forget the hardships that come their way, the setbacks, and the internal conflicts. Healing more often feels confusing, lonely and deeply inconsistent. It is filled with moments of weakness, numbness, sudden sadness and quiet anger. There are days when you feel completely fine and believe that you have left behind the wounds of the past. And then some sudden, invited feeling pulls you back — a flash of the past. The chest tightens, and some familiar heaviness returns. This is the moment where the confusion begins; you begin to question yourself — whether you healed at all.
The confusion occurs because of the way we are taught healing to be — a smooth, linear process. And when this doesn’t happen, we feel like something is wrong with us for feeling okay one week and undone the next.
In actuality, healing is not linear because our emotions are not linear. Pain does not just fade away simply because we understand or have learnt to function around it. Healing has layers; it’s not a series of steps. You process one layer only to find another one beneath. Sometimes, some parts of your experience remain untouched, and all it takes is a moment for them to resurface. This phenomenon makes progress feel uneven.
When healing moves unevenly, it becomes challenging to talk about it, to explain when you yourself can’t process your emotions. Unable to put your feelings into words, you eventually stop talking, and this is where loneliness quietly resurfaces.
People do understand the progress. But what they don’t understand is contradiction — how can someone feel fine and still be hurting? The urge to talk to someone but not knowing what you are asking for — it can feel frustrating and lonely. Sometimes, you don’t want solutions or someone to fix you — you just want someone to say, ‘I understand you; whatever you are feeling is real and valid, and it all makes sense.’ It’s not always pain that hurts; it’s the absence of understanding. Sometimes, being understood matters more than being comforted.
Healing is not a linear process; it is shaped by triggers, memories, and emotions that lurk in the silence, in the smells, and in the little things that can unexpectedly pull you back. Wounds that you thought were gone reopen, and suddenly pain, anger, guilt, and grief crash in all at once. You feel like drowning, as all your progress vanished. Even small words and moments can bring it back because healing does not erase the hurt; it teaches you to carry it.
You watch others move on and wonder why you are still there. Even when you feel fine on the outside, your mind is still solving what your heart has not. Time reveals the truths you could not see before, and new layers of pain feel like a step back, but they are a step forward. Closure, attention and understanding do not always arrive. Unspoken words and unanswered questions drag you back to what you left behind. Your mind sometimes hides pain to protect you, but when it comes out as anxiety, sadness, and heaviness, it’s not failure. It is your heart finally letting itself be felt and heal. In all such moments, healing is still happening.
The social and cultural pressure also steps in. People expect you to just get over it, move on or be strong because they treat healing as if it has a timeline. Such expectations put a lot of pressure on you to look recovered when you have not actually healed. You bottle up your emotions, go out and about, and act all okay. The emotions shut down for a while, but then these suppressed feelings resurface as sudden sadness and emotional breakdowns much later. Instead of helping you get better, being told to just get over it usually makes you hide the pain.
The cultural norms also affect how we judge ourselves. If it takes too long for us to heal, we begin to feel like something is wrong with us; we start comparing ourselves with others and feel like we are failing at something everyone else handles without problems. The real issue here is the expectations that getting over things should be quick and easy. Everyone processes trauma or grief at their own pace.
Resilience, in this context, is not about bouncing back immediately after a setback or being unaffected by a hardship. People often confuse it with being tough, that you can take anything without breaking. But in reality, resilience is not about avoiding suffering but about sitting with it, understanding it, and moving forward with courage, one small step at a time. It involves being compassionate about oneself rather than being hard on oneself. Being resilient means that even on days when life feels heavy and the burdens of the past overwhelm you, you manage to adapt and move forward.
Healing is not about reaching a destination where nothing hurts anymore. Healing is about how you cope with the feelings that come in the aftermath. On the days when anxiety strikes and you find yourself surrounded by distress and despair, don’t forget the progress you have made. As every time we return, we carry a little more understanding. Experiences that once felt overwhelming may still hurt, yet they no longer control every thought or decision. Healing does not bring direct comfort, ease, or happy endings. It does not eradicate the struggle or remove the pain completely, like it never existed. What it does is to bring steadiness and the ability to sustain the feelings without being consumed by them. It allows people to feel pain without letting it alter them, to make choices even when fear of outcome is expected, and to continue living rather than surviving. Healing teaches patience and understanding of one’s own emotions and memories. It allows happiness and sorrow, courage and vulnerability, to exist at the same time. Healing, in its crux, is simple; it appears in the daily life decisions to respond honestly instead of hiding and to treat oneself with care rather than being afraid of judgement. Over time, this strength grows and takes a constant place in everyday life. Even when pain returns, it no longer controls your whole mind. Progress may blur, old pain may resurface, and moments of strength and confidence coexist with doubt. That does not mean you are failing; it is a reflection of what it means to be a human.