The Inward Spiral: When Healing Circles Back
- Vanessa Harris
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Over the past few years, I have written openly about the most difficult season of my life.
It was a six month period where everything seemed to collapse at once. My separation. The loss of both of my parents. The quiet unraveling of the life I once believed was certain.
At the time, I was learning how to feel again.
Before that period, I had spent much of my life doing what many people who grow up in difficult environments learn to do. I compartmentalized. I stayed functional. I kept moving forward. But when everything fell apart at once, the emotions I had managed for years suddenly demanded to be felt.
When I started this blog years later, I wrote a lot about that process. About therapy. About grief. About learning how to sit with emotions that had once felt overwhelming. Back then, I could barely talk about my childhood without crying. Even mentioning certain memories would bring up a flood of feelings I wasn’t sure how to hold.
Over time, something changed.
Through therapy, writing, and movement, I slowly built the capacity to process what I had been carrying. I could tell the stories without being overtaken by them. I could look at my past with more compassion and less pain.
Eventually, I was able to write about it publicly. It has been incredibly rewarding to hear from readers how sharing my story has helped them reflect on their own lives and beliefs. That felt like proof something inside me had shifted.
I had moved from surviving to rebuilding.
Over the past few years, life has continued to unfold in ways that feel deeply aligned. I have loved, lost, and learned. I have travelled. I have finally moved back to the island, a goal I have carried for years. I have reconnected with my family. I began building work that feels meaningful and authentic.
I regained a genuine excitement for the future.
I even noticed something new happening. For the first time in a while, I felt curious about dating intentionally again. Not with urgency or longing, but with a calm kind of observation. I started getting clearer about what alignment in a relationship might actually look like for me.
It felt healthy. Grounded. Unforced.
And then recently, something shifted… A few days ago I learned something about someone I once loved. A small update about their life moving forward. The kind of news that shouldn’t have carried much weight anymore. But emotions do not always follow logic.
Suddenly, memories I had not thought about in years surfaced. Old questions drifted back into my mind. Not because I wanted them there, but because something about the moment reminded me of a part of my history that had once mattered deeply.
For a moment, it felt like I had taken ten steps backward.
Thoughts and feelings I believed I had already processed suddenly felt present again. Familiar questions resurfaced. The emotional weight of certain memories returned more strongly than I expected. The first instinct in moments like that is often discouragement.
We tell ourselves we should be past this by now. But healing rarely works that way.
What I am realizing again is something I wrote about years ago, and apparently needed to remember again. Healing is not a straight line. It moves in cycles.
We process something once. Then we live life for a while. Then, when we are stronger, more stable, and more capable of holding complexity, another layer rises to the surface.
Not because we failed to heal before, but because we are now ready to understand it more deeply.
Over the past few days, I have tried to approach these emotions the same way I learned to approach them years ago. Not by pushing them away. Not by interpreting them as a sign that something is wrong with me or with the life I am building. Instead, by noticing them, letting them move through.
I am reminding myself that emotions often surface when something meaningful is being integrated. For me sometimes that looks like writing about it. Sometimes it looks like sitting quietly and letting a memory pass through without trying to change it. Sometimes it simply means acknowledging that an emotion is present without assuming it will always be there.
Looking back at the version of myself who first began this journey, I can see how far things have actually come. The woman who once could not speak about her childhood without breaking down is now able to reflect on it with openness and clarity. The person who once felt lost in grief is now building a life that feels aligned, meaningful, and grounded in values she chose intentionally.
That growth is real. The emotions surfacing now do not erase it. If anything, they confirm it.
Because the fact that I can sit with these feelings, observe them, write about them, and trust that they will pass is itself evidence of healing.
The waves still come. But I am no longer drowning in them. Now I know how to float.
And more importantly, I know that the presence of another wave does not mean the ocean is pulling me backwards. It simply means I am still in it.
Still moving. Still learning. Still becoming.
Healing is not about reaching a point where difficult emotions never return. It is about recognizing them when they do and responding with the awareness we have built along the way.
And despite what the past few days may have felt like at first, when I zoom out and look at the bigger picture of my life, I still see the same thing I saw before.
A path that is unfolding exactly as it should.
With lightness and curiosity,
Vanessa
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