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Nobody really talks about the ugly side of healing. About how it doesn’t immediately make your life easier.

Sometimes, it makes you lonelier.

When you start seeing patterns clearly—manipulation, control, emotional neglect—you can’t unsee them. And sometimes, it means outgrowing relationships, jobs, even entire communities that once felt like home. And you might not expect it to feel so isolating. I know I didn’t. I thought healing would make me lighter, more loving, like Buddha—watching my pain float by without judgment, connected to beauty and peace and maybe even unicorns.

But real healing? It’s not passive. It’s disruptive. It calls out every way you’ve ever lied to yourself just to survive.

You start to see how you stayed in places too long—not because you were weak, but because your nervous system thought that safety meant staying put. Safety meant not changing. And when you finally tell yourself the truth, it hurts. Not because the truth is unkind, but because it breaks the illusion that helped you cope. You realize you weren’t ever the problem. The problem is the need we all develop to lie to ourselves in order to feel safe. Because in environments where being fully honest feels dangerous, self-betrayal becomes a survival strategy.

And then, something else happens.

When you stop lying to yourself, you start living in alignment. And once you’re aligned, it becomes impossible not to notice when others aren’t. You start seeing all the ways people’s words don’t match their actions—not because they’re necessarily trying to deceive you, but because most people are still lying to themselves. That’s the thing about self-awareness. It doesn’t just change how you see yourself—it changes how you see the whole world. And suddenly, you can’t unsee it.

That clarity can feel brutal. Because even when you know you’re growing, you still grieve. You grieve what never truly held you. You grieve the comfort of pretending. You grieve the hope that maybe, just maybe, they’d change. And even if you understand that people can only meet you where they’ve met themselves, it still stings when they can’t meet you at all. Especially when you realize that you can’t help them wake up. They have to do it on their own timeline. And in the meantime, you don’t have to be the collateral damage.

Growth isn’t betrayal. Outgrowing people doesn’t mean you never loved them. Leaving toxic environments doesn’t make you ungrateful. Setting boundaries doesn’t make you cruel. It simply means you’re finally choosing yourself.

That’s where the loneliness comes in. Healing creates a strange in-between space—where the old ways no longer fit, but the new connections haven’t fully formed yet. It’s a disorienting season. Or two. Or three. Depending on how you process.

But that loneliness doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re no longer abandoning yourself to belong. It means you’re honoring what’s real, even when it costs you comfort.

You’re not selfish for growing. You’re not broken because you don’t fit into old spaces anymore. You’re not losing your life. You’re finding your real one.

And no, it’s not all peace and transcendence. Some days, it’s raw and messy and hard. But it’s honest. And that honesty, over time, becomes its own kind of peace.

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