“One never realizes what has happened, one can only see what remains.” ~Marie Curie
I almost didn’t go to my cousin’s wedding.
Not because I didn’t want to celebrate him. I did it. But the thought of walking into a room full of people who knew the version of me two years ago seemed unbearable.
This version was well known.
The one who cried in the bathroom at family gatherings. The one who smiled through dinners while silently replaying an argument from three days earlier. Who drank a little too much at Christmas because it was easier than feeling everything so loudly in a room full of people who seemed to be perfectly fine.
I wasn’t well then. And now I wasn’t sure I was okay either.
So I almost stayed home.
But I left. And somewhere between the ceremony and the reception, my aunt pulled me aside and said something I didn’t expect.
“You look different,” he said. “It’s easier. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”
I drove home that night in silence, thinking about what he had said.
Lighter.
I didn’t feel any lighter. I still had hard days. I was still overthinking things. I still found myself slipping into old patterns sometimes – the people-pleasing, the self-doubt, the quiet background hum of anxiety that I had carried around for so long that I felt it was part of my personality.
But apparently something has changed from the outside.
And I totally missed it.
Over the next few weeks, I kept thinking about those words and wondering how anyone else could see a change that was invisible to me.
The problem of monitoring your own healing
Here’s what no one tells you about healing: You’re the worst person to measure your own progress.
When you’re in it – you live it every day – you don’t see the changes. You just see the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
You see the panic attack last Tuesday. Not the fact that you used to get them three times a week.
You see the night you went through a text message. Not the dozens of times lately that you haven’t.
You see the moment you almost apologized for something that wasn’t your fault. You didn’t always stop yourself before the words left your mouth.
Progress is hidden from the one who makes it.
I spent months working—in therapy, journaling, sitting in the midst of uncomfortable feelings instead of running away from them—and honestly believed that I was getting nowhere, that something was fundamentally broken beyond repair. That others were healed, but maybe I was the exception.
At the time, I was recovering from years of chronic stress and burnout. Learning to slow down became less of a self-improvement goal and more of a necessity. A difficult time of major life changes and trauma made me rethink how much pressure I put on myself every single day.
I kept a diary during this time. Not consistently, not nicely – just sporadic posts when things felt particularly difficult.
About a year later I went back and read it from the beginning.
I had to stop halfway.
Not because it was boring. Because I hardly recognized the person who wrote those words. The catastrophic. Constantly apologizing – even in your private diary, to yourself for having feelings. As he described himself as basically too much and not enough at the same time.
I sat with that diary on my lap for a long time.
Then I cried. Not quite from sadness. From something closer to grief – because of how hard he was on himself. And something else, something quieter.
Relief. Because I wasn’t him anymore.
Healing does not declare itself
I guess I expected healing to feel instantaneous.
A clean before and after. One morning when I woke up and felt, honestly, just fine. A conversation where I finally said the right thing. A day when the anxiety… went away.
That’s not how it works. Or at least it didn’t work for me.
Instead it worked like this:
One afternoon I noticed that a friend of mine had canceled our plans at the last minute, and I wasn’t offended. I was mildly annoyed, as most people are, and then went about my day.
Six months earlier, this deletion would have sent me into a spiral. I thought I had done something wrong. That they dragged on. That I was too much, or not enough, or somehow deserved to be given up.
But that afternoon I just… I didn’t go there.
I ordered takeout and watched a show I wanted to see. It was absolutely striking.
And that was the point.
Another time, a co-worker made a dismissive tone in a meeting. Something that, in a previous version of my life, would have lived in my head for weeks rent-free. I would replay it endlessly, trying to figure out what I did to deserve it, and making up answers that I would never actually say.
This time I thought about it on the way home. I decided he would say more about them than I would. And then let it go.
Just like that.
I didn’t even realize I was doing anything else until later in the evening when I realized I wasn’t even thinking about it.
This is what healing actually looks like. Not big revelations. Just quietly do things differently without realizing you’ve changed.
The dipstick was wrong
For a long time, I measured my recovery against the bad.
I measured it to perfection.
Against never overthinking again. Never feel anxious. I’ve never slipped into old patterns, had a hard day, or said yes when I meant no.
In this regard, I have consistently failed.
But healing has never been about becoming someone who doesn’t struggle. It was about becoming a person who struggles differently.
Who recovers faster. The one who gets caught in the middle of the spiral and decides not to finish it. One who feels the pull towards old patterns and recognizes it for what it is – fear, not truth.
A friend of mine who has been in recovery from alcohol for several years once said something that stuck with me.
“People always ask me if I’m cured,” she said. “I tell them that’s not the right question. The right question is, am I living better than I was? And the answer to that is yes. Every single day.”
I’ve thought about this a lot.
Am I cured of overthinking? Not. Am I living better than I was? Totally.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped needing them to be the same.
What I wish someone had told me
I wish someone had told me in the beginning that the healing would be almost invisible to me.
How I’m doing work and feeling like nothing is changing, and then one day a stranger—or an aunt at a wedding—says something that stops me.
That I’m looking for evidence of my own development but can’t find it because the biggest changes aren’t dramatic enough for me to notice right away. They are just… the absence of suffering that was constant before.
I wish someone had told me that the goal isn’t to reach a place where the hard stuff ends. You have to get to a place where hard things happen and it doesn’t completely fall apart like it did before.
I wish someone had told me not to compare my current chapter to my worst chapter and tell myself that I’m not healed enough. It’s like judging a book by comparing its middle chapters to its darkest opening pages and judging it to have not progressed.
I wish someone had told me to turn around every now and then. To look back at the journey I’ve already made, instead of just staring at how far I still have to go.
He turns around
I picked up that old journal again last month.
I’ve had a rough week – old anxieties creeping back in, a few nights of poor sleep, a day where I found myself liking people I thought I was over.
I felt like I was back to square one. So I read some posts from two years ago. And just like before, I hardly knew him.
Not because he was weak. It wasn’t. He did the best he could with what he had. But the weight he carried—the constant apologizing, the fear of taking up space as he talked about himself—was so heavy.
I don’t carry this weight the same way anymore. Some days it still appears. Some days I still feel the edges. But I don’t live under it like I used to. And that’s nothing. That’s all.
If you’re in the middle of it—doing the work and feeling like nothing’s changing—I want to gently ask you to turn around. To not stay there. Don’t live in the past. Just to see how far you’ve come.
Because you are not where you started. Even if you don’t feel like it. Even if no one has said it yet.
You are different. Quieter in a good way. Stronger in the ways that matter. You just don’t see it yet.
But you will.
About Dakota J. Dawson
Dakota J. Dawson writes about emotional sovereignty, healing, personal growth, mental wellness, and self-sabotage recovery. Her work focuses on emotional boundaries, breaking free from self-sabotage, and learning to protect your peace without apologizing for it. She writes about stoic detachment and the patterns that keep us stuck—people-pleasing, overthinking, toxic guilt and quietly getting in our own way—and offers gentle, practical strategies for finally choosing yourself. Get his e-book, Let everything influence you – get free here at a bargain price.
