On Healing
photo by author
In the dream, I’m having dinner on a terrace overlooking the garden of my Airbnb, a white building with a clay-tiled roof. Friends are beside me, enjoying our fancy meal. I’m in awe of this place’s simple and colorful beauty. Birds sing, and I believe they’re singing to me. They’re welcoming me to this new country, telling me stories of freedom.
Suddenly, the sun disappears and water droplets fall — first one by one, then collectively in an avalanche of water. The others aren’t fazed; they continue eating. The rain makes a lake in front of us, filling the garden, until it reaches the terrace height. I hear a crack, then the terrace breaks off of the building, and we’re floating away.
***
Since I moved to Mexico a few months ago, I’ve had dreams like this one almost every night. In the daytime, I’m pinch-me-happy. At night, the darkness swoops into my subconscious. If it’s possible to be haunted by pain, then surely this is what’s happening. I didn’t move to Mexico on a wave of joy — I moved here longing for peace from my years of inner turmoil and my frenetic New York City life. Now that I’m physically here, I want my mind to be, too. I want to be healed.
So, I do what we all do when we’re looking for answers. I google: What does it take to heal?
In my search, I find a sea of articles about physical forms of healing, mainly for flesh wounds. The internet gives me what most people associate with healing — stitches and bandages. I’m looking for something more. I’m looking for how to heal the darkness that almost pulled me under in 2022, that made me not want to be alive anymore.
***
When I was 11, I began suffering from stabbing stomach pains. This lasted until I was 14. They’d arrive out of nowhere, sometimes on days when I was otherwise feeling carefree and well. My parents took me to the ER once because I was screaming in pain. The doctor ran all sorts of tests, and everything came back clear.
“Where do you go to high school?” he asked, and I told him. It was a competitive one where I had to study several hours a night just to keep up.
“Ah, we see a lot of students from there.”
He left the room, and the space after his comment left questions hanging in the air.
***
On a cobblestone street here in San Cristóbal, a simple piece of graffiti fills the wall: ‘¿Conoces tu oscuridad?’
It means, ‘do you know your darkness?’
***
I didn’t start to look at my pain until I was 23, as I was going through what I thought at the time was a quarter-life crisis (little did I know I’d have one every few years). I was trying to decide whether to find a job or go to grad school. I applied to everything, paralyzed by indecision. I landed in the ER once again — this time because I was having a severe anxiety attack and couldn’t stop crying. The psychiatrist there asked me if I’d experienced any kind of trauma. I didn’t know what that meant. I took the pills and signed up for cognitive behavioral therapy. I was ready to be cured.
***
Therapy was like standing in my bedroom and really seeing the walls for the first time. I noticed the posters I had hung, the propaganda I had chosen to believe. They played on a loop:
“I’m nothing if I am not perfect.”
“Hard work is how I prove I deserve to be here.”
“Commitment is entrapment.”
I opened closets and took out memories that I had tossed in for my own safety. I saw myself as a child, curled up on the couch that was my bed, fearful of the yelling downstairs. I remember her thinking that adulthood would be easy because childhood was not. In her mind, we were just paying our dues.
***
In my 20s, I also found movement. I took Zumba classes with 50-year-old Dominican women at the local Lucille Roberts every Sunday. I started training for 5ks, then 10ks, then a half marathon. I did yoga to stretch my tight muscles. I felt myself solidifying, becoming stronger on the outside. Just like the straight-A student I was in school, I aced exercising. Friends and family commented on how healthy I was. Surely, I was healed.
***
On the eve of 30, five years into a nonprofit job I thought I loved, something pressed play on the recording again. I heard all the same messages, applied to my current life.
“You should be doing something else with your career, you’re stuck.”
“You have to change jobs, but a new job will trap you.”
“Where do you want to live? Make up your mind, you idiot.”
One day, I fell down the stairs by accident, and when I opened my eyes I was sad to realize I was still alive.
I did all this work, what was it even for?
***
My google search told me that when a wound heals, the new skin is only 80% as strong. This means it’s more vulnerable to being broken open again.
***
I recently started somatic therapy. Jennie asks me for permission to go deeper into painful topics. We mix in deep breathing and body scans to notice how my body is reacting to the conversation. And the sessions are bookended with practices that soothe me — meditation, yoga, a crossword puzzle, sitting in the sun and letting it warm my face.
***
One recent morning, on a run on a hill above the city with my new friend Kim, low-hanging clouds enveloped us. The dewy morning air mixed with the hot sweat I felt from running uphill and downhill, over and over. My knees began to ache, like they often do when I run.
“Mi mamá tiene artritis, quizás yo también” I told Kim. My mother has arthritis, maybe I do too.
“O puede ser que tienes alguna duda, alguna pregunta que está atrapado en tus rodillas.” Or it could be that you have some doubt or question stuck in your knees.
***
I realize now, I’ve never understood how healing truly happens. I’ve defaulted to ignoring pain or getting a prescription to ease it, never looking at its root, always wanting it to go away. I’ve trusted absolutely in the opinions of Western doctors and manuals. I’ve been suspicious of comments that sound too woo-woo, even as a student of yoga and meditation.
Traveling is a way to look at my pain in a new light. It shakes me out of centering the American system and experience. It opens me to new ways of being.
But travel doesn’t cure pain. Not the pain that runs deep — the existential, trauma-driven kind. The kind you carry in your heart and your brain and your muscles, like luggage you didn’t know you had packed.
I still don’t know where my travels are taking me, physically or emotionally. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be healed, the way that I imagined I could or would be. And maybe the most critical lesson I’ve learned is that the process of healing isn’t about ridding myself of pain. Rather, it’s about seeing it differently, learning from it, feeling it fully. Appreciating the darkness along with the light.
