you don't have to be healed to begin

a love letter to the unfinished and still becoming

There’s this quiet pressure, woven into so many of our conversations about care, change, and becoming:

you have to heal first.

before you love again.

before you show up.

before you matter.

But what if healing isn’t a prerequisite for meaning?

What if healing isn’t something you finish so you can begin?

What if healing is something you do through — through relationship, through work, through participation, through being alive in the world as it is?

Because there is no arrival. No final draft of you, free of pain or doubt.

Policing the Healing Timeline

We say we care about wellbeing. But often what we really mean is conformity.

A young woman leaves a relationship and begins another one ‘too quickly:’ “She’s not healing.”

She stays single for ‘too long:’ “She’s clearly still stuck.”

There is no right pace, only the right performance.

We are so often told to wait.

Wait until you are more whole.

Wait until you are less angry.

Wait until your grief has passed.

Wait until you are someone else, someone smoother, quieter, easier to understand.

But healing doesn’t always happen in stillness.

Sometimes it happens in motion.

In community. In conflict. In longing. In the middle of building something that matters.

Perfectionism in Disguise

This idea, that you must be healed before you act, is not neutral.

It is a story.

And that story often masks a deeper message: that we are not enough as we are.

That we must earn our place through wellness.

That we must graduate from pain before we can participate in the work of the world.

That our rawness, our tenderness, our wild, unfinished hearts are liabilities, not portals.

But healing is not a purity ritual.

It is not a performance for other people to judge.

It is intimate.

Interior.

Uneven.

And sometimes, the most powerful healing happens alongside the doing.

Not before it.

Healing Through, Not Before

You do not need to be fixed to be worthy.

You do not need to be finished to be effective.

You can be grieving and generous.

You can be tender and transformative.

You can be in pain and in service, both.

We are not here to prove our readiness.

We are here to live, to offer, to co-create.

This space is better when more people speak up. You’re welcome to join the conversation, however big or small your thoughts feel.

This is not about rejecting care.

This is about rejecting the false binary between care and contribution.

Between feeling and action.

You can tend your wounds and tend to the world.

You can cry and organize.

You can rest and resist.

You can rage and repair.

There is space for it all.

There is no gold star at the end of healing.

There is no certificate of completion.

There is only the next right thing.

The next loving step.

The next honest offering.

You are not a project.

You are a person.

And you are already enough.

Want to share your thoughts? I’d genuinely love to hear them. This space is a conversation, not just a monologue. Hit ‘reply’ or send me a message.

Further reading -

Silver Buckshot

you are your best thing

Tide Pool Thinking