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| My hospital room view in October 2024 |
Healing doesn't arrive the way we expect it to.
When my doctor told me that I would feel more like myself a year from my first surgery. I thought I would feel like who I was prior to October 2024. That is not what's happening, nor have I been fully prepared for it not to go the way I envisioned it.
After coming home from the hospital it was a series of OT and PT visits and doctor's visits. Eventually I returned to work and as I reflect on that, I don't know how I got through it to be honest. I'm doing everything that I was told to do. I was getting plenty of rest and making sure I took my medication. I was looking forward to June and the beginning of Summer. Then May came. My father who had battle prostate cancer for nearly 20 years passed at our childhood home.
So now, I'm healing from an illness that took over my entire life last Fall and I'm mourning the passing of my father, all while supporting our family through the grief process. Preparing for my father's funeral, looking at the pictures filled with so many memories, writing the obituary and helping to plan the repast was a lot. Mind you I'm at a new school, it's near the end of the school year and I'm exhausted, I'm depressed and I'm tired.
Healing, for me has looked like waking up and realizing how different my life feels. Healing doesn't arrive the way we expect it to. It's not neatly packaged and it doesn't exist without other obstacles or adverse situations occurring. Healing is a process that happens in time.
Healing looks like waking up and realizing your body feels different than it used to—and learning how to listen instead of pushing through. It looks like grief showing up in ordinary moments, long after the world thinks you should be "better by now." It looks like wanting to move forward, but finding that your spirit needs more time than your plans allow.
More time to just lay in the bed. More time to look outside at the trees for hours. More time to miss your father's presence. More time to wonder, "What's next for me?" "Who am I now?"
We're often taught to measure healing by progress. By how quickly we return to normal. By how much we can do again. But healing doesn't ask for performance. It asks for presence. Healing doesn't erase what happened—it teaches you how to carry it differently.
One of the big things that's come out of healing is this sense of identity and discovering who Arlinda is now and sitting with that. Sitting with God, reading the Bible, watching Faith based programming and journaling because I'm at a point in my life where things are very different.
There is also a quiet grief in healing that rarely gets named: the grief of who you were before everything changed. The life you imagined. The energy you once had. The certainty you assumed would always be there. Healing includes mourning that version of yourself without trying to recreate it.
I remember watching Super Soul Sunday years ago and I heard Pastor Michael Beckwith say, "Pain pushes until vision pulls." I try not to recreate who I was because that version of me doesn't exist and maybe that's part of the process. Because healing looks like trust rebuilding in small ways. Trust in your body. Trust in your instincts. Trust that even though life didn't unfold the way you expected, it is still worthy of being lived fully—just differently.
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