When Healing Doesn’t Look Linear

By Christen Cerrito

I remember being a little girl and fantasizing about the progression of my life. I would imagine all the milestones I’d reach, each one leading to the next. When I pictured how my life would go, there weren’t any curveballs or detours.

If I could impart my older wisdom upon that little girl now, I’d tell her this:

Life won’t be a series of boxes for you to check off. Life will be messy. There will be seasons that pull you away from the life you thought you were building. You will question everything you thought your life was supposed to look like.

And life will take you away from yourself... But it will also lead you back to yourself too. Through healing. Through developing a compassionate and honest relationship with yourself.

That healing won’t be linear either – because life isn’t linear. But you will evolve through continual shifts and changes by staying connected to yourself. You'll stop measuring life by the milestones you once thought mattered. Instead, you'll begin building a relationship with the life you're actually living.

It won’t happen all at once. It will happen through a million moments that slowly change the way you see yourself.

When Pleasing Became Survival

The fighting and mood changes from your parents won’t get better. They’ll become more frequent and more frightening. Both of them will come to you to vent, each hoping you’ll understand their side of the story.

Without even realizing it, you’ll become attuned to the smallest shifts in their emotions, always trying to anticipate the next outburst before it happens. You’ll also learn to prioritize other people’s feelings over your own, believing that if you can just keep everyone happy, maybe you can keep the peace. This is how life first takes you away from yourself.

You’ll carry this with you into your teenage years. Relationships will feel confusing. You won’t understand why your friends don’t seem to value your feelings when you try so hard to value and care for theirs. Your mom will tell you that you expect too much from people, but that isn’t true. You'll just never have learned to value your own feelings.

You’ll abandon your dreams of creativity and helping people to pursue an education that pleases your parents. You’ll excel in it. You’ll become determined to be the person who impresses everyone around you. That determination will eventually lead you into a demanding career that encourages your people pleasing even more.

By early adulthood, you’ll become so disconnected from yourself that you’ll constantly seek validation from others. You’ll people please at work and in your relationships and you’ll continue to be confused when your care isn’t reciprocated.

You’ll wonder why no one seems to value you. But how could they, when you'll never have learned to value yourself?

Finding The Way Back

During a time when you become acutely dissatisfied with your life, you’ll be thrown a big curveball. You’ll be involved in a car accident that leads to a diagnosis of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

You’ll be overcome with symptoms that make everything feel so loud. Everything will feel like too much. It will feel like the careful, composed person you worked so hard to become has been ripped away from you. It will feel like you are broken.

The months that follow will be spent going to doctor’s appointments, receiving therapies, and healing in nature. You’ll realize how sick you’ve become trying to please everyone but yourself. You’ll realize that you want to learn how to better take care of yourself.

And then you’ll be let go from your job. The one that was so impressive. The one that gave you independence. The one that seemed like a dream when you first started.

But you’ll also begin to see it differently. It was a job where you had no boundaries. A job where you were overworked. A job where you weren’t respected enough for your employer to honor the time you needed to heal from a TBI you sustained.

So instead of running back to a similar position once you’ve recovered, you’ll choose to prioritize your own well-being for the first time. You’ll dedicate this next season of your life to learning about healing.

This is when life finally begins to lead you back to yourself.

The Breath That Brings You Home

After exploring a variety of healing modalities, you’ll discover one that changes everything. Breathwork.

Through breathwork, you’ll rediscover all the parts of yourself that you hid away while pleasing others. You’ll finally give yourself permission to express those parts freely. You’ll allow yourself to be the softer version of you that you tried so hard to harden in response to unsafe conditions.

You'll move back in with your mom so you can focus on your healing. It will become one of the most transformative seasons of your life. Breathwork will uncover the origins of the things that disturb you most. New awarenesses and old memories will lead you to learn more about dysfunctional families and survival patterns.

You’ll finally understand why you felt so dissatisfied. It was because you never felt like you were enough. The things you wanted were never enough. That led you to pursue a life that never truly felt like your own.

The time will come when you decide to pursue a life that does feel like yours. You’ll deepen your relationship with yourself through breathwork, and you’ll choose a different career path. You’ll become trained as a breathwork facilitator and finally experience the satisfaction of work that aligns with your true nature.

You’ll hold space for people. You’ll help them feel safe. You’ll create spaces where people can learn about themselves. You’ll facilitate connections and cultivate community.

All while staying true to the version of you that was forgotten all that time before.

You’ll finally feel like yourself.

Life Happens Again

Your breathwork business will take longer to grow than you realized, and you’ll return to the work you did before your TBI to honor your need for greater independence. You’ll do this with the intention of building your business on the side, and you’ll have so many ideas for what it could become.

This decision will allow you to move out of your mom’s house and into your own home with the partner that will love you for who you are. It will feel exciting, and you’ll have so many plans for your new creative space.

But the new job will quickly become overwhelming. Your coworkers will resent the leadership role you’ve been given because of your expertise. You’ll experience bullying from your peers and praise from your superiors. The people pleasing tendencies will begin to surface again.

You’ll start working long hours, and you’ll be so exhausted from the physical demands and the stress of being bullied that you’ll have little energy for your breathwork business. You’ll tolerate the mistreatment from your coworkers for a while until you'll finally draw a line and make it clear that you won’t accept it anymore. You’ll fight the urge to put their job security before your own need for safety when confronting them directly isn’t enough and you'll bring it to management.

Things will get better after that. For a while.

Then you’ll begin experiencing a variety of symptoms that make life feel unbearable. Pelvic pain. Extreme fatigue. Brain fog. Low back pain. Urinary urgency. Painful gas. Painful sex. Bloating.

Throughout this time, you’ll use breathwork to stay connected to yourself and listen for what your body needs. You’ll decide you can’t work full-time anymore and advocate to become part-time. That decision will give you space for doctor’s appointments, rest, and to explore different avenues of relief. But it still won’t leave enough room for your business yet, and you’ll begin to feel hopeless about the life you truly want.

You’ll see doctor after doctor. Several will tell you nothing is wrong. But because you’ll have cultivated such an attuned relationship with yourself by now, you’ll know they’re wrong. This will become the fight of your life as you advocate for yourself while drowning in painful, life-disrupting symptoms. It will be so overwhelming that you’ll become isolated and depressed.

But you’ll keep fighting.

Eventually, you’ll find a specialist in endometriosis. You’ll have imaging that comes back normal. And still, you’ll trust what you know to be true. So you’ll choose surgery, and they will discover and remove endometriosis. You’ll cry from the validation and relief of finally knowing you were right.

As you recover, you’ll begin to feel lighter again. You’ll start to come out of isolation and return to the communities that supported you before. Life will begin to feel hopeful again.

Opportunities will finally come to life from the ideas you dreamed about years before. You'll begin working toward your goals again. You'll even be promoted at work while remaining part-time. You’ll slowly start to feel like yourself again.

And that’s where you’ll find me today.

Thirty-one years old.

Strong.

Passionate.

Unyielding.

Compassionate.

Authentic.

Hopeful.

Still evolving.

For Anyone Who Needs This

Maybe your life hasn't looked linear either. Maybe it’s taken you away from yourself more than once. Maybe you've grieved the person you thought you would become. Maybe you've questioned everything and wondered what you’re moving towards.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that healing isn't about never getting lost again. It's about learning how to find your way back to yourself, over and over again.

So, wherever you are in your journey, I hope you keep choosing yourself. I hope you keep listening. I hope you keep trusting that even when life takes an unexpected turn, your way back is still within you.