When Healing Requires Honesty First

Every year begins the same way:

New intentions; Fresh energy; The promise that this might finally be the year things turn around.

I start hopeful… again.

Convinced I’m close to a breakthrough, a missing piece, a treatment or practice that will finally push me off the edge of surviving and into real healing.

Sometimes, I taste it.

Moments.

Weeks.

Weeks where my body feels like it’s healing, where I let myself believe this time it might last.

But it doesn’t.

Not yet.

So the cycle repeats: Hope, then crash. Hope, then loss. Always living on the edge, grasping for progress, only to fall back again. It’s a quiet, relentless cycle of grief.

And this week, I couldn’t find hope at all…

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I came into this year with ambition. This was going to be the year I turned over the Long COVID leaf and got my life back. I was building something new, thinking outside the box, following everything I’ve learned.

And it didn’t work.

Again.

That disappointment landed hard; it wasn’t surprising or dramatic, just heavy. The kind of heaviness that makes it hard to imagine anything ahead. Sometimes it feels hopeless. I yearn for my life back. To walk freely. To laugh without calculating the cost. To talk, to skip, to be free, and finally be present with family and friends.

This illness has taken so much: joy, belonging, spontaneity, even emotion itself. At my worst, I couldn’t feel excited or upset. Talking was too much. Existing was too much.

There is real grief in losing a life while still being alive.

What I don’t see talked about enough is how quickly we’re encouraged to gloss over this part.

We’re told to stay positive. To focus on healing. To visualize recovery. To prevail.

But before we can rise, we have to acknowledge what has fallen.

Grief is the shadow side of hope. Ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear, it just makes it louder in the body. In my experience, grief isn’t something to overcome, it’s something to sit beside. To let it speak. To let it soften into something more honest.

So I sit with it.

I sit with the pain and the loss and I do what I’ve come to see as a necessary ritual: I write down what I’m grieving and I burn it. Not to erase it, but to honor it. To say, “This mattered. This still matters and I release you to a higher power” (a phoenix rising from the ashes).

And when the ashes settle, something else always comes into view.

Perspective.

I see how far I’ve come:

I can laugh now. I can joke. I can cry. I can feel. I’m building strength and endurance again, brick by brick, into a life that looks different than before, but is still real.

Compared to last year: weekly crashes, being tethered to the couch, nights of relentless heart racing… this is progress.

Right now, I’m not crashing.

I can drive. I can sit and socialize. I can move beyond the couch. I even steam-cleaned two rugs recently (something that once would have guaranteed a crash). I came close, but I didn’t fall apart. The things I’ve learned helped me recover instead of collapse.

And I’m grateful.

So yes, I grieve in layers.

But I also hope in layers.

Each one laid like a brick. Sometimes added, sometimes removed. Sometimes cracked. But when I look back, I’m very slowly building a new life again from the rubble.

And this year I know I’m going to find a life once more not on the edge.

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A Final Truth I Keep Returning To

If you’re in a place where hope feels out of reach right now, I don’t think that means you’re failing.

I think it means you’re being honest.

And honesty doesn’t leave us stuck.  It creates space.

Space for new perspectives.

Space for integration.

Space for healing that doesn’t rush or deny what’s real.

I’ve learned that every time I acknowledge my grief, truly sit with it, hold it, and stop fighting it, something begins to shift. It may not be immediate and it may not look like the healing I once imagined, but it is healing.

So this week, I grieve.

And I also know, because I’ve lived this cycle enough times now, that when I allow this part of myself and this illness to be seen and held, a new beginning eventually comes.

Not because I forced it.

But because I made room for it.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself somewhere in these words, I want to gently invite you to pause.

To sit with your own grief for a moment, not to solve it or rush it away, but to acknowledge it. To let yourself name what’s been lost, what hurts, what you’re tired of carrying.

You don’t have to make meaning of it yet.

You don’t have to turn it into hope or strength or growth.

Sometimes the most healing thing we can do is simply say, “This mattered, this still matters, and so do I.”

If it feels right, write it down. Sit with it. Honor it in whatever way feels safe for you. And trust that by making room for what’s true, you’re already beginning something new, even if you can’t see it yet.

If you’d like to follow along as I continue to share reflections, insights, and practices for living with chronic illness and chronic conditions, please consider subscribing to my newsletter at the bottom of the blog. I’d love to have you along on this journey 🤍

With Heart,

~Dr. Rachael