Residency Night Four: Yes, I’m Still Healing

🎬 Previously on: “My Mental Health”

We open with me on the couch—graham crackers in hand, whispering affirmations into the general vicinity of my left kidney like it’s a roommate who still owes me rent. Healing, apparently, is a TV series with terrible scheduling and excellent wardrobe choices for crying.

As you may recall… By June, I’d had enough kidney stone surgeries and ER visits to qualify for a punch card—“buy 10, get one free.” Somewhere between surgery #2 and the umpteenth CT scan, I started calling my left kidney Lazarus—because every time she almost died, she clawed her way back. Turns out Lazarus isn’t the only part of me that refuses to stay buried.

Waves are my new aesthetic. One minute the water is glass and forgiving; the next minute I’m guppying through a riptide of panic, wondering when someone added emotional sharks to the lineup. Healing doesn’t do straight lines. It makes loops, it gets lost, it shows up late and crying, and somehow—gradually—it moves you forward anyway.

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🌊 Calm Before the Emotional Riptide

When I was in TQRC (my rehab), there were routines I could lean into—appointments, group, meals that arrived at regular times. For the first time in a long time, I started to practice believing the version of myself that could feel steady for a breath or two. I practiced pacing my breathing until my lungs actually hummed instead of snapping.

So when they told us there would be a shuffle and my old roommates were moving out, I had a meltdown at group. I said it aloud: that no one has ever really liked me, that the old roommates were a fluke, that I was too neurotic, too “high-maintenance” to be loved. I sobbed like it was inventory week and the shelf labeled “me” came up empty.

Exactly one week later, in that same room, during that same weekly meeting, one of my new roommates spoke up. Completely unprompted, she said how thankful she was for me—how I was kind, informative, caring, funny, sweet and awesome, and how she wouldn’t have made it without me. That I was the best roommate she’d ever had. I knew this had to be a Godwink moment, since she’d only been in the house 5 days which meant she wasn’t at the previous meeting.

So, there it was: the universe hitting “reply all.”

Honestly, if my life had a laugh track, this would’ve been the character development episode.

In the same circle where I’d confessed my fear of being unlikable, someone answered back with love—and did it publicly. If you’d told my past self that the list of things I was sure made me unlovable would be the very things someone loved—I would’ve laughed until I cried. Which is exactly what I did. Again.

That little group-room miracle was a thesis statement for me: sometimes healing is other people holding up a mirror and finally showing you what you couldn’t see. It’s not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s a sentence that lands like a bandage.

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🚫 The Dad-Thing (The Arrival That Shouldn’t Have Been)

Later—during my hiatus from TQRC to manage medical chaos and more scans—my world got smacked sideways again. He came to town. Not invited, not announced in any kindly way that left room for me, just… present in the same city like a footnote I didn’t authorize.

Love that my trauma decided to host a surprise family reunion without checking my calendar first.

I never saw him. If it’s up to me, I will never see him again—because I have decided that for my safety, he is not allowed in my life. He came to attend an event he wasn’t needed at which caused me to miss an event I dearly wanted to attend. But knowing he was here did something the body understood before my brain could: it filed for emergency shelter. Panic, then freeze. I barely slept, I missed appointments including to my therapist. Just spaced it like it was never scheduled. I had nightmares that looped the same small humiliations he loved to taunt me with and the giant-sized fear he still evokes. For weeks I kept waking up with the same taste of dread.

I want to be explicit and honest about how it landed on me: at times I thought and said out loud, “I won’t feel safe until he is dead.” That is the jagged truth I have carried—more an expression of how unsafe he makes me feel than anything I wish to act on.

(For the record: I do not want him dead. I want him gone from my life, removed from my world, and removed from his power over me.)

Saying that out loud felt like vomit and confession and prophecy all at once.

Trauma doesn’t consult calendars. Grief doesn’t either.

“There’s no timeline for missing someone,” I wrote in Grief Has No Calendar.

There’s also no timeline for a panic attack triggered by an unexpected presence. Both feel ruinous and immediate. Both are allowed to be true.

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🌀 When the Waves Collide

Medical recovery + mental recovery + old family dynamics = a blender with no lid. The renal surgery drama (hello, Lazarus) and the emotional vertigo of family ghosts don’t stack politely. They slam into each other and make a kind of wreckage that takes time to sift through.

Here are the facts: sometimes your nervous system regresses not because you failed, but because it finally feels safe enough to process what it’s been protecting you from for years. Sometimes collapse is the only way the thing inside you can come up for air and start to reorganize. The spiral is not the same as being stuck. It’s not a backward replay so much as a deeper rewrite.

If my progress had a chart it would look like an EKG—jagged, alive, occasionally dramatic at 3 p.m. and profoundly quiet after snacks. It’s messy, but it’s life.

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💡 Tiny, True Things I’ve Learned

• Safety teaches the body more than pep talks ever will. Repetition builds safety. Repetition heals.

• Witnessing matters: being told you are seen, even once, can change a brain.

• Codependent impulses will flare when old roles are reintroduced. That flare is not failure. It’s data—information about what still needs protection and boundaries.

• The breakdown is often the beginning of the build-back. The cry can be a repair.

• Sometimes the bravest thing I do all day is not throw my phone at the universe. Ten out of ten recommend restraint.

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🌅 The Shoreline (Tender + Defiant)

There are days I am exhausted and days I feel like a soft, fierce version of myself. Both are true. The ocean does not apologize for being loud sometimes. Neither will I.

I used to think healing meant never falling apart again. Now I know it just means I’ve learned how to hold myself when I do. I am learning how to float when the tide pulls too hard, and I am learning how to walk out of rooms that don’t feel safe. I am learning that moving might be the map to the safety I need—and that’s an action, not a surrender.

So yes—I’m still healing. No—it’s not linear. And also: I am still here.

I will show up for myself again tomorrow, even if it’s with graham crackers and a cookie sheet of band-aids.

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🗨 Call to Action

If this week’s post hits somewhere deep—share it. Not for the algorithm, but for the reminder that we’re all still learning to stay above water.

Tag someone who’s been your mirror, or drop one thing you’ve learned about healing in the comments. Let’s normalize the messy middle together. 🩷🌊

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🍪 Snack Call for Next Week

Residency Night Five is coming in hot: “Things I’ve Yelled at God (And What He Whispered Back)”

Bring cookies for bargaining, tea for repentance, and a tub of rainbow-chip frosting—otherwise known as my emotional-support frosting.

Because sometimes the holiest thing you can do after yelling at God is eat something colorful and forgiving. 💓🌈

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🎭 Closing Line | Residency Night Four

Breakthroughs don’t feel shiny; they feel like truth with band-aids.

Sometimes they show up in group therapy rooms and nightmares, sometimes in unexpected words from people who see you clearly.

They sting, they stick, and they heal in layers—proof that the messy middle is still progress.

Curtain falls for tonight.

Encore in two weeks. Bring the frosting. 🧁🌈