I thought I was past this.
I wish healing was something you completed once. But I learned the hard way, it’s never truly over. Healing is not a finish line you cross and never have to revisit again; it is an ongoing, lifelong process that you return to in different seasons of your life, sometimes willingly, and sometimes because life forces your hand.
For years, I thought I had done the work. I had spent so much time learning myself, healing old wounds, building routines that supported my mental health, regulating my emotions, setting boundaries, and creating a life that finally felt stable and safe. I genuinely believed I had found my footing again.
And then 2024 happened.
Just one week after my miscarriage, I found out the temporary funding for the job I loved would not be made permanent. In the span of days, I lost not only my first child, but also the career, stability, and sense of security I had worked so hard to build for myself.
I do not think I fully processed either loss before survival mode kicked in.
Something in me flipped. The grief became compartmentalized. I stopped asking myself how I felt and started asking myself what I needed to do next to survive. I took the first job I could find that offered the salary I needed. After nearly five years of working remotely, I suddenly found myself back in an office, commuting, molding myself for the approval of others, masking my exhaustion, and trying to force myself to adapt to a life that already felt too heavy to carry.
From the outside, I looked functional. I was showing up. I was working. I was getting through the days.
But internally, I was unraveling in ways I could not yet admit to myself.
What I was going through became almost completely invisible to everyone around me. Eventually, it became invisible to me too. I convinced myself I was just stressed. Just tired. Just adjusting. I told myself that if I could just push a little harder, get through this season, stay productive, stay grateful, stay strong, I would eventually feel like myself again.
But somewhere between grief, burnout, and survival mode, I stopped recognizing myself entirely.
When It All Fell Apart
The thing about burnout is that it rarely arrives all at once. For me, it was grief and stress layering on top of each other until I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. I wasn’t just processing a miscarriage, or a job loss, or a new job that drained me beyond recognition—I was carrying all of it at the same time, trying to function like nothing had changed.
On the outside, I was still moving forward. I was showing up. I was doing what needed to be done. But internally, I was constantly fighting to stay afloat.
At one point, I leaned into fitness as a way to cope. I lost some of the weight I had been carrying for a few years, and for a while, I felt proud of myself. It gave me something to focus on when everything else felt chaotic. I built a new routine, something that looked like stability from the outside.
But I was still drowning.
No matter how much structure I tried to create, I couldn’t keep up with my life. My home stayed messy no matter how often I tried to reset it. I didn’t have the energy to see people I loved, even on weekends that were supposed to be restful. I would sit in the quiet and feel completely depleted, like I had nothing left to give to anyone—including myself.
I wasn’t just tired. I was disappearing into survival mode.
And still, I didn’t fully recognize how bad things had become until the moment I finally did.
It was the day before I left for a long-planned vacation to Peru. Work had been intensifying for months—our organization was going through ongoing changes, and my workload had quietly tripled. Not slightly increased. Tripled. I was doing the work of multiple people and trying to hold it together with no additional support.
Two weeks before that trip, I had requested a single Wednesday off. Just one day in the middle of a heavy stretch, to breathe and reset. I had completed all my work. Nothing was falling behind. I thought it was reasonable.
Instead, I was called into my boss’s office.
It wasn’t framed as a conversation—it was a reprimand. I was told I shouldn’t be taking time off when things were busy. That my coworkers were working more overtime than I was. That, despite completing everything in my role within a standard 40-hour workweek, I was being seen as not doing enough.
I remember sitting there trying to process what I was hearing, because internally I knew the truth: I was already beyond capacity. I was burnt out, overworked, and operating without meaningful support. And still, I was being measured against a standard that required me to sacrifice even more of myself just to be seen as “enough.”
But even in that moment—especially in that moment—something in me shifted.
Because even when everyone around me was trying to convince me I wasn’t enough, I decided that I was.
That I had been enough all along.
That doing my job well within a reasonable boundary did not make me lazy.
That my worth was not something I had to earn through exhaustion.
That moment didn’t fix everything. In fact, it worsened my anxiety tenfold because I knew I had to leave, and I couldn’t see a way out at the time. But it marked the beginning of me refusing to abandon myself in order to meet expectations that were never sustainable in the first place.
The Part Nobody Talks About — The Tools Didn’t “Fix” It
This is the part I didn’t expect to struggle with the most.
Because I was still doing the things. I was still using the tools. I was still showing up for my healing in all the ways I had been taught to. But somewhere along the way, I started to question whether any of it was actually working, or whether I had somehow undone all the progress I thought I had made.
Fitness became one of my biggest coping mechanisms. It genuinely helped me manage anxiety and stress in a way I hadn’t been able to before. It gave me structure when everything else felt chaotic, and it gave me something measurable to hold onto in a season that felt completely unstable. Watching my body change and my strength build gave me a sense of progress during a time when everything else felt stagnant and unsustainable.
But even that started to come with a cost. I began to swing between extremes. I would either sleep too much from what I can now recognize as depression, or lie awake for hours with anxiety that would not settle. The very thing that helped me feel grounded also began to drain me because I was using it to outrun how overwhelmed I really was.
I was still in therapy, but I was not in a place where I had the capacity to do everything “right.” I did not take the time to carefully find a therapist who was the perfect fit for what I needed in that specific season. I just needed someone, anyone, to help me keep my head above water. It was not about deep breakthrough work at the time. It was about survival. About having a place to put the weight I could not carry alone.
And that was true for most of my tools.
I journaled, but it often felt repetitive. I went on walks, but sometimes they felt like I was just moving my anxiety from one place to another. I tried to rest, but rest came with guilt. I ate as well as I could, but even nourishing myself felt like something I had to force. I was still trying to set boundaries, still trying to ask for support, still trying to step away from productivity culture, but none of it felt like it was making anything better in the way I expected it to.
Even TikTok, which had been one of my creative outlets and a space for expression, started to shift for me. What once felt like a place to share and connect began to feel like something I was forcing. I found myself trying to promote healing content while I was genuinely unwell, and that disconnect started to feel increasingly heavy. I was still showing up online, but internally I did not always feel aligned with what I was sharing.
And slowly, that is where the doubt crept in.
I started wondering if I had regressed completely. If all the work I had done on myself had somehow disappeared the moment life got hard again. If I had only been “doing better” when things were easier instead of actually healing.
But what I did not understand at the time is that the tools were never meant to fix me on the spot.
They were not failing because they did not immediately make me feel okay. They were working because they were the only reason I made it through a season that otherwise could have completely swallowed me.
Healing, I learned, is not a finish line you reach and stay at forever. It is maintenance. It is repetition. It is showing up for yourself in ways that do not always feel effective in the moment, but still matter deeply in the long run.
Coping skills do not prevent pain. They carry you through it.
And progress is not erased just because you enter a season where survival is all you can manage.
Recognizing Something Had to Change
The shift was not dramatic. It did not happen in a single breakthrough moment or some clear, cinematic realization. It was quieter than that, and slower. It came from the accumulation of exhaustion, from trying to keep going in a life that was slowly draining me in every direction.
I had been in survival mode for so long that I stopped noticing it was survival mode. It started to feel like normal life. Wake up, push through, perform, collapse at the end of the day, repeat. Even the things that were supposed to help me heal had become part of the effort to keep myself afloat rather than truly supporting my wellbeing.
At some point, I began to understand something I had been avoiding for a long time. I could not heal in an environment that was actively depleting me. I could not rebuild myself while constantly being pulled past my limits. And I could not keep calling it strength when what I was really doing was surviving conditions that were not sustainable.
But there was another layer to it that took even longer to fully name.
A huge part of this season became about trying to find my voice again in a space where it often felt like it was being quietly suppressed. I found myself questioning what I was allowed to say, how I was supposed to show up, and whether I needed to minimize my experience in order to be accepted at work. I started noticing how often I would downplay how much I was struggling, not just to others, but eventually to myself.
And I reached a point where I could not keep doing that anymore.
I stopped pretending I was fine when I wasn’t. I stopped hiding how much I was carrying just to appear “resilient” or “professional.” I began showing up more honestly, even when it felt uncomfortable, and even when it wasn’t received well. There were moments where being truthful about my capacity or my boundaries was met with pushback, and I had to decide whether I would abandon myself again to make things easier for other people, or whether I would stay rooted in what I knew I needed.
I chose myself, even in the discomfort of that.
There was something deeply clarifying about realizing that I had been trying to earn rest, understanding, and basic respect through overextension. And I no longer wanted to live that way. I started setting clearer boundaries around my time and my energy, especially at work. I stopped absorbing responsibility that was not mine to carry. I started protecting space for myself instead of constantly offering it away.
That realization did not happen all at once, and I did not get it perfect. But slowly, I started to understand that part of beginning again was not just rebuilding my routines. It was rebuilding my relationship with myself.
Eventually, I made the decision to leave my job and step out of the environment that had been steadily eroding my mental and emotional capacity. I started slowing down in ways I had resisted for a long time. I stopped trying to optimize every part of my life and instead focused on simply getting back to myself. I began rebuilding routines not around productivity, but around stability. Around breath. Around peace.
Beginning again did not look inspiring at first.
It looked like drinking water and trying to eat regularly again. It looked like taking walks without turning them into something I had to “make the most of.” It looked like opening the curtains in the morning even when I didn’t feel like it mattered. It looked like going back to therapy, not to fix everything quickly, but to have somewhere safe to land. It looked like cooking one nourishing meal and considering that enough for the day. It looked like saying no without overexplaining. It looked like sleeping when I needed to sleep, crying when I needed to cry, and letting myself be human again instead of constantly trying to function.
Slowly, I started to reconnect with parts of myself that had felt distant for a long time. My creativity. My body. My thoughts. My sense of identity outside of survival. I began to understand that healing was never going to be a straight line or a finished version of myself I could arrive at and stay in permanently.
It was something I would have to return to again and again.
But this time, I was no longer trying to force myself to push through at all costs. I was learning how to come back to myself instead.
You Can Always Begin Again
If there is one thing I hope someone takes from this, it is that you do not lose your progress just because you enter a hard season. Healing does not disappear when life becomes unmanageable. It does not get erased by grief, burnout, or the seasons that pull you past your limits.
There were moments in this chapter where I truly believed I had undone everything I had worked for. That I had slipped backward, that I was failing at something I was supposed to have “figured out” by now. But looking back, I can see that I was not going backward. I was moving through something that required a different kind of strength than the one I was used to measuring myself by.
Survival mode is not a permanent state, even when it feels like it is. It is a response to overwhelm, not an identity. And at some point, you either keep building a life around surviving, or you start making space to come back to yourself.
What I have learned is that there is no shame in needing to rebuild. There is no shame in realizing something is not sustainable and choosing to change it. There is no shame in outgrowing environments, habits, or versions of yourself that were created just to get you through.
Beginning again is not a failure. It is an act of honesty. And more than that, it is an act of hope.
Hope that you are still in there, even when you feel far away from yourself.
Hope that your capacity can return.
Hope that your life does not have to stay the way it was when you were at your most depleted.
Maybe healing was never about becoming someone who never falls apart again. Maybe it is about learning how to return to yourself every time you do.
And maybe the most human thing you can do is simply begin again.
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