(Why I Stopped Waiting to Be Done)
For a long time, I thought healing was something I had to finish before I could actually start living.
Like there was this invisible finish line somewhere out there. And once I crossed it — once I’d done enough therapy, enough shadow work, enough inner child stuff, enough of all of it — then I’d finally be ready. Ready for the relationship. Ready for the life. Ready to actually show up as the version of me I knew was in there somewhere.
So I kept going. Layer after layer after layer. If you’ve ever peeled an onion, you know how this goes — you pull one layer back, and it just sits there getting dry and kind of gross and messy. You have to face all of that before you can peel it away and find the fresh layer underneath. And then that layer does the same thing. And the next one. And the next.
I was peeling. And peeling. And peeling.
And one day I just stopped and thought — when do I actually get to start living?
That was the moment I realized I was on the hamster wheel. Not because I was healing — healing is beautiful and necessary and it never really ends. But because I had made healing my whole identity. My whole reason. My whole excuse for not fully showing up in my own life yet.
And here’s the thing nobody told me: you are never going to be done. There is no finish line. So if you’re waiting for it — like I was — you’re going to be waiting forever. And your life is happening right now, while you wait.
Healing isn’t linear. It’s a spiral.
Every time something comes back around, you’re meeting it from a different level — a different awareness, a different version of yourself. That’s not failure. That’s how it actually works.
Think about the onion. You peel a layer back, and that outer layer sits there getting dry and kind of gross. You have to face the mess of it before you can peel it away and reveal the fresh layer underneath. And then that layer does the same thing. Over and over.
So when something comes up that you thought you already healed — before you spiral into “why is this happening again” — ask yourself:
Am I a different person than I was the last time this showed up?
Am I seeing it from a new perspective?
Am I being triggered differently than before?
If yes — that’s the spiral doing its job. You’re not back at square one. You’re just going deeper.
But if the answer is no — if it feels like the exact same pattern, the exact same reaction, nothing shifting or changing — that’s the hamster wheel. And the hamster wheel is a sign that something needs a different approach, not just more of the same.
The bathroom mirror moment
I remember one morning so clearly. I was in my bathroom, fresh out of the shower, doing my makeup. Just a regular morning. And it hit me — this quiet, almost disorienting realization — that from the time I was 16 years old until I was 40, I had only ever known one kind of relationship. Toxic. Manipulative. Abusive. Years of being controlled, being told who I was, having words said to me that I eventually just accepted as truth about myself.
I had done so much healing around this. Years of it. And I genuinely was in a more confident place — I want to be clear about that. The work had done something real.
But some of those words? They still showed up. Quietly. In the back of my mind. Even after all of it.
One of the things I was told — and I’m going to say this out loud because I know I’m not the only one — was that if I was fat, nobody was going to want me. Said to me repeatedly. Said to me when I was pregnant. Let that sink in for a second. Pregnant. And I was still being told that.
I was by no means fat. But that didn’t matter. That voice had lived in me for so long that it didn’t need much of an invitation to come back.
Here’s where it gets real. I’ve done a lot of deep nervous system healing — starting to truly understand how two decades of living in survival mode, in chronic stress, in that relationship, affected my body physically. And one of the things I’ve come to understand about myself is that when I’m stressed, my body holds onto weight. It’s not a willpower thing. It’s not a discipline thing. It’s what a nervous system that spent twenty-plus years in fight or flight does.
So all it took was a few pounds. Stress showing up in my body the way it does. Stepping on the scale and seeing a number a little higher than last month. Clothes feeling a little snug. Nothing dramatic — but just enough. And that voice would be right there waiting.
Nobody’s going to want you.
Years of healing. Genuinely more self-aware and confident than I had ever been. And still — in that moment, in that bathroom — that old story had an in.
And I realized something. All the shadow work in the world couldn’t fully undo that belief. Because my nervous system, my body, my identity — they had never actually experienced anything different. The only evidence I had was the old story. And you can intellectually understand that a story isn’t true, but until you have lived proof that it isn’t — until your actual reality starts showing you something different — part of you is always going to hold onto it.
This is why living IS the healing.
And that’s when it clicked for me. Really clicked.
Not just intellectually — I’d understood it in theory for a while. But in that moment I got it in my body: I was never going to heal my way to worthiness by staying on the hamster wheel. The proof I needed wasn’t going to come from another layer of the onion. It was going to come from actually living something different.
I remember talking this through with my healer at the time, and she said something that just landed. She said: you’re either on the hamster wheel, where healing becomes your whole identity — or you make the decision that you’re ready to start living. And those two things can’t fully coexist. At some point you have to choose.
And I think that’s the part nobody talks about. Because so many people who are deep in the healing journey — really doing the work, really committed to it — they’re not staying on the hamster wheel because they don’t know better. They’re staying because somewhere underneath it all, they don’t actually believe they’re worthy of getting off.
They’ve had such a hard life for so long that on some level they’ve just… resigned themselves to it. Like this is just what life is for them. Hard. Heavy. Always another thing to work through.
But here’s what I want to say to that — and I say this as someone who lived in that belief for a long time:
We don’t do all of this work just to still deal with shit.
We do it so we can actually start living. So we can wake up and see the beauty in the world around us. So we can feel joy — real joy, not the kind you have to talk yourself into. So we can look at our lives and think, holy shit, this is incredible.
I truly believe — and coming from someone who never believed this about herself, this means something — that we are all meant for a level 10, pinch-me life. Not as a reward for suffering enough. Not once we’ve finally healed enough. But because we’re here, and we’re alive, and that is what we came for.
You don’t have to wait.
Not instead of the inner work. Not skipping the shadow work or the therapy or the deep stuff. But alongside it. Because here’s what I’ve come to understand: we can go deep. We can do the really dirty, hard, uncomfortable shadow work. We can face the darkest parts of ourselves and our stories. And that is powerful and necessary.
But until our reality starts showing us something different, the old stories don’t fully let go.
A new partner who looks at you like you are exactly enough. Who tells you that you are beautiful just as you are. Who loves you without conditions or control. That experience does something in you that no amount of journaling or therapy fully replicates. It gives your nervous system new evidence. It starts to rewrite the story at a level that goes beyond the mind.
And that only happens when you start living.
So if you’re waiting — if you’re somewhere on your healing journey thinking, I just need to do a little more work before I’m ready — I want to offer you a different thought.
What if the living is the next layer of the healing?
What if the relationship, the leap, the dream, the thing you keep putting off until you’re more healed — what if that’s actually how you get more healed?
You don’t have to wait. You’re not broken. You’re not behind.
You’re just a person, on a spiral, getting closer to yourself with every single loop around.
And you are allowed to live on the way there.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to connect. Come find me and let’s talk about what it looks like to actually get off the wheel.