Unpopular Opinion: You Can’t Heal at the Same Pace That Broke You
We live in a culture that breaks at full speed and then expects healing to keep up.
Lose everything? Bounce back.
Grieve? Glow up.
Burn out? Rebrand.
We don’t just survive , we package our survival into content.
We post “moving on” before we’ve even stopped bleeding.
We rush to fix what actually needs to be felt.
But you can’t heal in the same rhythm that hurt you.
You can’t rebuild a nervous system in the tempo of collapse.
Most of our suffering isn’t from what happened, it’s from how fast we tried to recover.
The Pace That Broke Us
We are chronically rushing through our own humanity.
We apologize for still being sad.
We downplay grief because it makes other people uncomfortable.
We call it “resilience,” but really, it’s just repression wearing a motivational quote.
No one tells you that after the crisis ends,
your body doesn’t know it’s over.
Your mind moves on but your cells don’t.
They’re still living in the echo of it.
That’s why you wake up exhausted even when you “should” feel fine.
The body has its own clock for healing
and it doesn’t care about your deadlines.
The Biology of Slowness
When your nervous system has been in chronic stress,
you lose access to calm.
Cortisol stays high, adrenaline lingers,
and your prefrontal cortex, the part that feels joy, clarity, and focus, dims.
So when people say, “You just need to get over it,”
they’re asking a flooded system to sprint.
And sprinting only deepens the fracture.
Healing and repair has a tempo, and it’s quieter than the world allows.
The Cost of Rushing
We think if we just move fast enough,
we’ll outrun the ache.
But speed only keeps the wound open.
It stops us from integrating what actually happened.
That’s why grief leaks out sideways as irritation, detachment, anxiety, fatigue.
It doesn’t disappear. It disguises itself.
At some point, you realize you’re not actually healing
you’re just decorating the wreckage.
So maybe this isn’t your season to rise.
Maybe it’s your season to move slower than your ego wants,
and gentler than the world understands.
Healing isn’t about bouncing back.
It’s about coming back, to your body, your breath, your boundaries.
To the life that’s still here, waiting for you to match its pace.
With you in this.
Love,
Zelana
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