To the Ones Healing in the Dark

©️ By Sophie Lewis | The Grooming Files | Shadowborn Series

This isn’t about love and light. This isn’t some soft-lit reel with ambient music and the word ‘healing’ in cursive.

This is for the ones crawling through it. The ones who shattered, and didn’t come back as some glowy, peace-filled version of themselves, but came back raw. Different. Wiser. Still shaking.

You’re not broken. You’re becoming. And it’s messy as fuck.

I’ve walked this path. Not the soft spiritual one they show you on TikTok. Mine has been made of silence, of grief so loud I couldn’t breathe, of rage I didn’t know what to do with, of loneliness so vast I thought I’d dissolve inside it. I’ve screamed into pillows, begged the universe to let me disappear, taken psychedelics just to sit with the pain long enough to understand it. I’ve hallucinated, fallen apart, met myself over and over again in the void. And still I rise, cracked and clearer.

So if you’re in it right now, if the wave has swallowed you again, let this be your mirror.

Real healing isn’t pretty.

It’s vomit on the floor. It’s rage at 2am. It’s cutting everyone off because you don’t know who’s safe. It’s not meditating. It’s dissociating and trying not to hate yourself for it.

It’s scrolling through your memories trying to figure out which moment broke you. It’s not trusting your own mind some days. It’s trying to speak and nothing comes out. It’s flinching at kindness. It’s crying when the room is silent. It’s the paranoia that everyone will leave once they see what you really carry.

Sometimes healing is not running from the fact you want to burn it all down. Sometimes it’s holding your own broken self and whispering, “I know. I know. I’m still here.”

Sometimes it’s letting the shadow speak. And not silencing it this time.

The shadow is not your enemy.

It’s your grief. It’s your wounded child. It’s your protector that got stuck in fight mode. It’s your rage that knows you were never protected the way you should’ve been.

The shadow doesn’t want to destroy you. It wants you to listen.

It wants you to stop pretending you’re fine. It wants you to scream. To write the truth. To stop watering yourself down to be digestible. It wants you whole, even if that means messy, angry, blunt, and misunderstood.

And I promise you: there is gold in the dark. Wisdom. Power. Magic. You don’t have to force yourself into light to be valid. You are sacred even in collapse.