What If We Don't Heal All the Way?

I was sitting in meditation recently, thinking about a very painful time in my life. I had a thought that struck me in a powerful way:

"What if you never fully heal from this?"

My first instinct was to protest. What do you mean, never fully heal? Isn't that the whole point? Aren't I supposed to be working toward some finish line where I'm finally, completely, triumphantly done?

But as the words settled, something in me relaxed. Not resigned - relieved.

Because somewhere deep down, I think I already knew.

The Fantasy of Being "Fixed"

We live in a culture obsessed with completion. We want our healing to work like software updates: download, install, reboot, and voilà now you're now running Healed Human 2.0, complete with bug fixes and enhanced emotional stability.

We read books about people who overcame their trauma and now teach workshops. We follow Instagram accounts of people who found their purpose after rock bottom. We secretly believe that if we just try hard enough, pray long enough, or find the right therapist, we'll graduate from our pain.

But what if that's not how it works?

What if some things don't get fixed - they just get held differently?

The Archaeology of Old Wounds

I have a friend who lost her mother when she was twelve. She's fifty now, with a beautiful family and a career she loves. By every external measure, she's "healed." She's functional, joyful, generous.

But every Mother's Day, something still clenches in her chest. Every time she accomplishes something big, there's still a split second where she reaches for the phone to call someone who will never answer.

Is she broken? Or is she someone who has learned to carry an irreplaceable loss with grace?

I'm starting to think there's a difference between healing and erasure. Healing doesn't mean the hurt disappears. We live with the hurt, but perhaps we learn to hold it without it holding us hostage.

The Tender Places That Remain

Maybe your tender place is the divorce that taught you about resilience but still makes you flinch when you hear "our song" on the radio.

Maybe it's the childhood that gave you empathy but left you hypervigilant in crowds.

Maybe it's the miscarriage that deepened your compassion but still catches your breath when you pass the baby clothes section at Target.

These aren't signs that you're failing at healing. They're proof that you loved deeply, that you're human, that some experiences leave marks precisely because they mattered.

When Healing Becomes Another Performance

Here's what I've noticed: sometimes our pursuit of complete healing becomes just another way to perform perfectionism.

We measure our progress like we're climbing a mountain, expecting that one day we'll reach the summit and plant our flag in Completely Healed Territory. We apologize for our setbacks. We hide our bad days. We feel embarrassed when old triggers resurface, as if they're evidence that we're not trying hard enough.

But what if healing isn't linear? What if it's more like tending a garden? Ongoing work, seasonal changes, requiring both acceptance of what won't grow and celebration of what blooms anyway?

The Unexpected Gift of Incompleteness

There's something beautiful that happens when we stop trying to heal all the way: we become more human, not less.

The friend I mentioned? Her motherless places have made her the person you call when you're grieving. She doesn't offer platitudes or quick fixes. She sits in the dark with you because she knows that sometimes the dark is where love lives.

My own unhealed places - the anxiety that still visits, the childhood stuff that still echoes - they haven't made me broken. They've made me someone who can recognize pain without trying to fix it immediately. They've taught me that being okay and being hurt aren't mutually exclusive.

Living in the Space Between

What I'm learning is that there's a spacious middle ground between "completely broken" and "perfectly healed." It's the space where most of us actually live. We live there not despite our wounds, but with them.

In this space, we can acknowledge that some Tuesday in March might still be harder than it should be, and that's not a failure of faith or therapy or positive thinking. It's just Tuesday in March, and you're still human, and some things echo longer than we expect.

In this space, we can be grateful for how far we've come while also being honest about where we still hurt. We can celebrate our resilience without performing invulnerability.

The People We Become

Here's what I think really happens when we heal: we don't become people who never hurt. We become people who can hurt and still love. Who can be afraid and still show up. Who can carry old sorrows and still make room for new joy.

We become people who can sit with others in their incompleteness without needing to fix them, because we've learned to sit with our own.

That's not a consolation prize. That's wisdom. That's the kind of healing that actually heals the world. It’s not the fantasy kind of healing that erases everything, but the real kind that holds everything with love.

A Gentle Practice for the Unfinished

If you're tired of trying to heal all the way, if you're ready to make friends with your incompleteness, try this:

Name one thing that still hurts. Not to fix it or analyze it, but to acknowledge it. Place your hand on your heart and say, "This is part of my story, and I don't need to be ashamed of it."

Thank your tender places. What has this hurt taught you? How has it made you more compassionate, more real, more able to love imperfectly?

Practice the phrase: "I am both/and." I am both wounded and whole. Both healing and hurting. Both strong and tender. You don't have to choose.

Remember: you are not a project to be completed. You are a human being, beautifully and necessarily unfinished, and that's exactly as it should be.

The truth is, we don't heal all the way. We heal enough. We heal into people who can hold complexity, who can love with scars, who can be broken and beautiful at the same time.

And maybe that's not the healing we ordered, but it's the healing that makes us most magnificently, tenderly, gloriously human.