On the discomfort of progress and why the middle is its own kind of sacred.
Healing doesn’t announce itself.
There’s no ribbon-cutting ceremony. No certificate of completion.
It arrives slowly, in strange forms—like tolerating the silence you used to run from, or suddenly realizing it’s been days since you thought about the thing that used to break you.
But more often, healing is awkward.
Half-done.
Full of contradictions.
You can be better and still feel broken.
You can laugh and still carry grief in your chest like a houseguest who never quite unpacks.
You can move forward and still glance over your shoulder more often than you want to admit.
We don’t talk enough about the middle part.
The part where things aren’t raw anymore, but they’re not settled either.
The part where you’ve deleted the number, but still remember it.
Where you know better, but still slip.
Where the wound has a scab, but the skin underneath is still tender.
That’s the place Halfway to Whole came from.
I didn’t write it from a mountain top. I wrote it from the stairwell—pausing between floors, unsure whether to go back down or keep climbing. It’s not a book of answers. It’s a book of questions that sat with me while I was still too tired to go looking for the answers myself.
“I thought healing would feel like becoming myself again. It didn’t. It felt like becoming someone else I could live with.”
That line cracked something open in me. Because no one tells you that healing might change you. That you might not return to some idealized version of your past self. That you might grow into someone quieter. Someone softer. Someone slower to trust but quicker to forgive—especially yourself.
I used to think I wasn’t allowed to speak about healing until I was done.
Until I had my closure framed on a wall and all my feelings alphabetized.
But here’s what I know now:
Being half healed is still healing.
It’s still worthy.
It’s still forward motion, even if it’s quiet and crooked and entirely unremarkable to anyone else.
If you’re in that middle space—
not shattered, not whole,
just in process—
you belong here too.
You don’t have to finish healing to be worthy of rest.
You don’t have to wait for wholeness to begin again.
You don’t even have to know where you’re going to keep walking.
Progress isn’t always pretty.
But it’s sacred.
And you’re already inside of it.
