embracing being a work in process

a reminder that you don’t have to be okay yet. just here.

We speak about growth like it’s a blueprint.

Like it’s something you can map out in straight lines and bullet points, as if healing is a staircase with numbered steps and each one takes you higher, closer, better. As if every time you move forward you’re guaranteed never to go back. As if self-awareness is a permanent fix and not something you have to remember, over and over again, in the middle of the night when your breath is shallow, your chest is tight and your heart is aching for a past version of you who didn’t know better, but hurt less.

We speak about clarity like it arrives once, brightly, like lightning, and never leaves. But clarity comes and goes like waves. It recedes just when you thought you’d learned enough to stay dry. It tests you. It leaves you soaked and shivering, whispering, “I thought I was past this.”

We pretend the journey should be continuous forward motion. A straight line. A steady climb.

But it isn’t.

It’s wandering.
It’s coming undone.
It’s returning to the same wound again and again, each time with a little more knowledge and the determination to try to heal it again.

Real growth is not cinematic. It’s not a breakthrough moment set to music. It’s not a smooth montage of yoga classes and journaling and morning sunlight streaming through windows. It’s awkward and repetitive and raw. It’s forgetting what you already knew. It’s re-learning what you thought you’d mastered. It’s saying the same truth to yourself—not once, not twice, but a dozen times before it finally sinks beneath your skin, not just as knowledge, but as something closer to muscle memory. Something your body begins to believe even when your mind is tired of trying.

Some days you’ll marvel at how far you’ve come—the way your voice doesn’t shake anymore when you say no, the way you catch yourself in the middle of an old pattern and gently choose something new. And other days, you’ll find yourself back in places you swore you’d left behind. You’ll feel like a fraud in your own life. And shame—that quiet, cruel voice—will try to convince you that growth has an expiration date, that if you’re still struggling, you must not be growing at all.

But listen to me: that voice is lying.

You are not broken because your healing has taken longer than you planned. You are not a failure for needing reminders. You are not weak for circling back to wounds you thought were already closed.

You are a work in process.

And not in the tidy, pretty, platitude kind of way. Not in the self-deprecating, humblebrag way people use to make their imperfections more palatable. I mean it in the most sacred, human sense.

You are becoming. You are living in the middle of a sentence that hasn’t ended yet, in a paragraph that’s still unfolding. You are still learning how to hold yourself without judgment. Still figuring out how to believe in a future that brings more questions than answers. Still trying to make peace with the fact that healing doesn’t come with a deadline.

Even the parts of you that you thought were done—the confidence you thought you’d earned, the boundaries you thought you’d drawn in permanent ink, the peace you thought you’d tucked safely into your bones—sometimes they unravel. Sometimes they ask to be rebuilt. And that doesn’t mean you’re starting over. It means you are still alive enough to change. Still soft enough to open. Still honest enough to admit: I don’t have it all figured out.

That’s not weakness. That’s the work.

The quiet, invisible work that no one claps for. The kind that happens in the pauses between conversations. In the late-night unraveling. In the mornings where all you can manage is to get up and keep going, even if your heart feels heavy and your hope feels small.

And maybe no one sees it—the way you choose gentleness instead of self-destruction, the way you breathe through discomfort instead of abandoning yourself, the way you forgive yourself for not knowing then what you know now. Maybe there’s no milestone to mark it. No trophy. No proof.

But that doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t make it any less worthy.

Because progress isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet as a whisper in the back of your mind that says, this time, we’ll do it differently. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a longer pause between impulse and action. A little more softness where there used to be self-blame. A single breath taken before falling apart—or deciding not to.

That counts. God, it all counts.

So if you’re in a season of not knowing—if the future is scary, if your past is pressing too hard against your present, if the ground beneath your feet feels like fog—I hope you give yourself permission to stay. To rest. To not force clarity where there is only becoming.

Let it be messy.

Let it be slow.

You do not need to perform your healing to prove it’s happening. You do not need to rush your becoming to be worthy of pride.

You are allowed to be unfinished. Uncertain. Undone.

You are allowed to say, I am still figuring it out, and let that be not a confession of weakness but a declaration of courage.

Because being a work in process doesn’t mean you’re behind.

It means you are still choosing to try.

It means you are still here—waking up every day in a body that remembers pain but still reaches for softness. Still choosing connection. Still daring to believe that something new is possible, even if it hasn't arrived yet.

It means you haven’t given up on becoming someone you can belong to—someone who feels safe in their own skin, steady in their own truth, soft without apology.

And maybe that’s the most beautiful thing you could be:

Not finished, polished or perfect. But faithful, real, and present.

Still learning. Still hurting. Still healing. Still here.

Still showing up for yourself, again and again and again, even when no one sees it. Even when no one claps. Even when the only witness is your own aching heart.

Because this? This is not a setback. This is not a failure. This is not a flaw.

And one day—maybe in conversation, maybe in silence—you’ll think back to this version of you.

Not with embarrassment. Not with pity. But with a strange kind of reverence.
Maybe not fondly, but honestly.

You’ll remember how heavy everything felt.
How loud the doubt was.
How most days you didn’t know if any of it was working.

And still, you stayed.

Not because it was graceful.
But because it mattered—because something in you refused to vanish.

And no, it didn’t feel like becoming. It didn’t feel like a triumph.

It felt like driving to a new destination without a GPS. No idea if you were headed the right way. No guidance: just a steering wheel, shaking hands, and a gut instinct that maybe forward was still worth believing in.

It felt like holding a life together with bare hands. No tools. Just pressure, patience, and the quiet resolve not to let it fall apart.
And somehow, you didn’t.

It felt like trying to build a home out of nothing but your own breath—walls made of patience, floors made of grace, a roof stitched from moments you didn’t give up.

Unstable at first.
But it held.
Somehow, it held.

That’s what you’ll remember.
Not that you had it all figured out.
But that you didn’t—and you still tried anyway.

You won’t need to romanticize it. You won’t need to rewrite it.

You’ll just know: I didn’t abandon myself when it would've been easier to.
And that will be the quietest, truest kind of pride.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it?

What you will build from this place—from the ache, from the stillness, from the quiet battles unwitnessed—that’s what will last.

Not the performance.
Not the pretending.
But this.

This quiet persistence to keep going when no one told you how.

You don’t need to be finished to be worthy.
You don’t need to be certain to be brave.
You don’t need to be whole to be here.

You just need to keep choosing yourself—even when the shape of you is still changing.

That, in the end, is what makes you unshakable.

Not that you became someone else.

But that you sat in the discomfort long enough to become someone who could hold pain without losing yourself to it.

That you stayed in the mess until it turned into meaning.