Beloved

I need you to hear this today, however many times it takes before it finally settles into your bones: you deserve to heal.

Not the version of healing that happens on schedule, not the kind that impresses anyone watching, not the kind that finishes by a date you set for yourself in a moment of desperation. Real healing is the slow and undramatic kind, the kind that circles back around on a Tuesday for no reason at all and asks you to feel it again.

You do not have to have earned this. You do not have to have suffered enough first, or forgiven everyone first, or figured out the lesson first. Healing is not a reward for good behavior. It was never waiting on your worthiness, because your worthiness was never the question.

You are allowed to grieve what you lost even after you have said you are fine. You are allowed to still flinch at the memory long after everyone else assumed you were over it. You are allowed to need more time than you promised anyone, including yourself.

Beloved, your healing does not have to be beautiful to be real. It can look like staying in bed. It can look like crying in the car before you go inside. It can look like laughing again before you feel ready to, and it can look like not laughing at all for a while.

You do not have to heal alone, but you also do not have to explain it to be worthy of doing it in peace.

The tenderness you keep offering everyone else is also owed to you. The patience you extend so easily to people who have hurt you belongs, first, to the woman still finding her way back to herself.

So here is what I want you to carry with you today. You are not broken beyond use. You are not behind some invisible schedule everyone else seems to be keeping. You are not required to be finished by any particular Sunday.

You deserve to heal at the pace your own heart can hold. You deserve to heal without an audience.

And you deserve, more than anything, to believe that on the other side of all this tending, there really is a softer place waiting for you.

From my heart to yours, beloved. I promise you it is true.

Lisa Kyles Monroe