No one tells you how loud healing can be.

They talk about calm. About softness. About light returning in manageable doses, like morning through clean windows. They sell it as a gentle thing; tea steam and deep breaths, affirmations written in tidy handwriting, progress measured in smiles that come easier than before.

But no one prepares you for the way recovery sometimes sounds like breaking.

Some mornings it begins before you’re even awake. A tension already coiled in your chest, as if your body remembered something before your mind caught up. You open your eyes already exhausted, already bracing, already irritated by the sheer act of existing in a world that expects you to be better now. Healed now. Grateful now.

You stand in the shower longer than necessary, letting the water hit your shoulders too hard, not because it’s soothing but because it keeps you present. Because standing still without sensation feels dangerous, like your thoughts might rush in all at once and knock you flat. The water helps drown out the noise, until a single sentence from yesterday replays itself without permission, cracks open something you thought had closed, and suddenly you’re shaking with no clear reason.

This is the part no one posts.

The anger that comes without explanation. The way irritation blooms where hope is supposed to live. The way your body reacts before you can remind it that you’re safe now, that the threat has passed, that you survived.

Healing, it turns out, does not arrive politely.

It interrupts. It ruins plans. It cancels things you meant to enjoy. There are days you sit on the edge of the bed staring at your phone, typing and deleting the same apology, trying to explain why you can’t come, why you can’t pretend tonight, why smiling feels like a performance you no longer have the energy to sustain.

People call it withdrawal. Self-care. A phase.

They don’t call it honesty.

There’s a cruelty in the expectation that healing should make you easier to be around. That it should smooth your edges, soften your reactions, make you quieter, kinder, more palatable. As if recovery’s true success is measured by how little discomfort you cause others.

But sometimes healing does the opposite.

Sometimes it makes you louder. Less accommodating. Less willing to swallow your reactions just to keep the room comfortable. Sometimes it teaches you how to say no without cushioning it, how to leave without explaining yourself, how to let a door slam because closing it gently would feel like another betrayal.

Your emotions don’t move in straight lines. They double back. Repeat themselves. Return in different disguises. You swear you’re done with certain feelings, certain habits, certain reactions, only to find them waiting for you on a random afternoon when the air feels wrong and a stranger’s cologne drags you backward through time.

You stand in a fluorescent aisle surrounded by things you don’t need, trying to remember why your chest feels tight, why your throat burns, why tears show up without invitation. You don’t want to be noticed. You don’t want to be helped. You just want to get through the moment without collapsing under its weight.

This, too, is part of it.

Healing isn’t a staircase. It’s a spiral. You recognize the scenery, but you’re not standing where you were before. Even when you feel like you’ve fallen, something in you has shifted. You notice your reactions sooner. You name them faster. You survive them with less shame.

There are days you don’t bloom. Days you wilt quietly, withdrawing from light, conserving energy. Days you feel like something inside you is decomposing; old beliefs, old versions, old ways of surviving that no longer fit but haven’t fully released their grip.

And on those days, the world still expects productivity. Positivity. Gratitude.

You stop pretending.

You stop dressing your pain in acceptable language. You stop trying to sound brave. You stop performing resilience like it’s a requirement for love. You let yourself admit the truth: that healing sometimes feels ugly, inconvenient, disruptive. That it asks for space, not applause. That it demands honesty more than grace.

There is a strange relief in this admission.

Because once you stop insisting that recovery must look beautiful, you make room for it to be real.

You learn that relapse does not erase progress. That revisiting old patterns does not mean failure, it means there is still something asking to be understood. You learn to sit with discomfort without rushing to justify it. To allow anger without turning it inward. To cry without immediately apologizing for taking up space.

You learn that being whole does not mean being polished.

Wholeness is jagged. Uneven. Still carrying scars that ache when the weather changes. Still sensitive to certain sounds, certain smells, certain tones of voice. Wholeness is knowing where the fractures are and choosing to live anyway.

There is no audience for this kind of work. No neat before-and-after photo. No final version you arrive at and stay forever.

There is only the quiet decision, made over and over again, to remain present. To stop abandoning yourself just because you’re inconvenient. To choose truth over performance, even when truth is messy, loud, unfinished.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you notice something else.

The moments of destruction were not an ending. They were a clearing. A necessary collapse of structures that were never built to hold you gently. What grows in their place is not decorative, not delicate, not easily admired-but it is yours.

Unpolished, unapologetic. Alive.

Your healing isn’t pretty.

But it is honest.

And that honesty is what makes it last.

- Makitia Thompson