Brie Nicole Inked

I used to believe that healing was a destination I could arrive at if I just moved quickly enough. As if there were a version of me whole, steady, unburdened, waiting somewhere ahead. All I had to do was become her as efficiently as possible. I treated growth like a task to complete, something measurable, something I could track and accelerate if I tried hard enough. I thought if I could outrun the heaviness, I could finally feel light.

But healing does not respond to urgency. It resists being rushed, quietly unraveling any illusion that I can force myself into wholeness before I am ready to hold it.

There is a particular kind of impatience that lives within me, one that whispers that I should be further along by now. That I should have already let go, already understood, already transformed. It compares my inner landscape to an imagined version of who I could be and finds me lacking. And for a long time, I listened to that voice. I pushed myself to move on before I had fully felt, to redefine myself before I had fully understood who I had been.

But there is a cost to becoming too quickly. Parts of me were left behind in the rush. Unheard, unprocessed, still quietly aching beneath the surface. I began to realize that the person I was trying so desperately to become could not exist without acknowledging the person I currently am. Healing, I am learning, is not a shedding of self as much as it is a gathering.

There is no clean line between who I was and who I am becoming. There are only overlapping versions of me, each one carrying something forward. The sadness I wanted to escape, the confusion I tried to silence, the lingering questions I wished I could answer. All of it belongs. All of it asks not to be hurried past, but to be witnessed.

I am learning to sit with myself in a way that feels unfamiliar. To allow the process to be slow, even when it unsettles me. To resist the urge to measure my progress against invisible timelines. There are days when healing feels almost imperceptible, when it exists not in breakthroughs but in small, quiet shifts—a softer reaction, a gentler thought, a moment where I choose understanding over judgment. These are the movements I used to overlook, too focused on becoming to notice that I was already changing.

There is something deeply humbling about accepting that I cannot force my own unfolding. That growth happens in its own time, guided by rhythms I do not fully control. I am not late. I am not behind. I am simply in process.

And maybe the person I am trying to become is not waiting somewhere far ahead of me. Maybe she is being formed here, in these moments I once deemed too slow, too uncertain, too incomplete. Maybe she is shaped not by how quickly I arrive, but by how honestly I allow myself to move through each stage of becoming.

So I am learning to loosen my grip on the future version of myself. To stop chasing her as if she is separate from me, as if she exists only at the end of some imagined finish line. I am learning to meet myself here—with all my unfinished edges, all my contradictions, all my quiet progress that does not announce itself loudly.

There is no rush. Not in healing, not in becoming.

I am allowed to take my time. To grow in ways that are not always visible, not always linear, not always understood. I am allowed to be both a work in progress and a whole person at the same time.

And maybe that is where healing truly begins. Not in becoming someone else as quickly as possible, but in allowing myself to fully be who I am, for as long as it takes.