What Healing Actually Looked Like

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help—a Catholic Marian feast day that I have held close for a long time, and one that has taken on a particular weight this year. A year ago today was the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and I remember who I was on that day, what I was carrying, and how differently the light looked then than it does this morning.

A lot has happened in the year between then and now—much that I never thought I would face or be asked to bear, moments that cost me more than I knew I had, seasons that asked things of me I did not feel equipped to give, and a darkness I would not have chosen and would not wish on anyone.

And yet, as I sit here this morning—candles lit, coffee in hand, genuinely and completely at peace—what I feel most is awe at the healing that has taken place. It is an awe that is born not of passivity but of real, hard, unglamorous work, and at the same time a deep humility in knowing that the work alone did not do this. Grace did—grace that I did not earn and did not deserve and that came anyway, the way the best things always do.

I want to share what this year of healing looked like—practically, honestly, from the inside—because if you are in a place of needing healing, or in the middle of a healing season of your own, I hope that something here might help you. That is the only reason to tell it.

First: What Healing Is Not

Healing is not the absence of pain, not the resolution of every hard thing or the answering of every open question, and it is not a destination you arrive at and then stay permanently, luggage unpacked, nothing left to tend.

Healing is an active, ongoing, deeply intentional practice of returning to yourself—of choosing, again and again, the conditions that allow you to grow rather than the ones that keep you stuck, of being honest, sometimes uncomfortably and sometimes inconveniently honest, about why you are the way you are, and deciding that understanding yourself is worth the discomfort of looking clearly.

That is where I started this year: with the decision to look clearly.

Digging the Roots

The most important thing I did this year was go back before I tried to go forward.

There is a reason therapists and researchers keep returning to early attachment as the foundation of adult behavior—because it genuinely is. The way we learned to love and be loved, the way we learned whether the people we needed would stay or leave, the conclusions we drew about our own worthiness before we had the language to name what we were concluding—all of that lives in the body and the nervous system long after the original experiences have passed.

It shapes how we move through relationships, how we respond to perceived abandonment, how quickly we reach for control when we feel unsafe, and how we interpret the behavior of people we love through the lens of the worst thing we were ever taught to expect.

I had to look at my own patterns honestly:

The Invisible Wounds: The subterranean fears that were running quietly underneath a great deal of my behavior.
The Old Armor: The ways I had learned to protect myself that were once genuinely necessary and had long since become obstacles.
Performance vs. Exposure: Shifting away from what I had trained myself to perform because performance felt safer than exposure.

Research on trauma and attachment—from pioneers like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose work on how the body holds trauma has changed the field, and Dr. Dan Siegel's work on interpersonal neurobiology—consistently shows that real healing requires more than intellectual understanding. It requires going back into the places where the original wounding happened, with enough safety and enough support, and metabolizing what was left unprocessed there. Not reliving it, but metabolizing it—and I have come to believe there is a profound difference between the two.

The Practices That Held Me

Alongside the deeper interior work, there were daily practices that created the conditions for healing to happen. These are not shortcuts, but the soil, because you cannot grow something in depleted ground.

Prayer and the Sacraments: This is the foundation of everything for me—not prayer as performance or obligation but prayer as relationship, as the daily, honest, sometimes wordless practice of showing up to a Presence that already knows everything and loves me anyway. The Eucharist has been the most stabilizing force in my life this year. There is something about receiving something simply given—not earned, not contingent, just given—that rewires something in a person who has spent too long believing that love must be deserved. I went to Mass and I kept going, and it held me in ways I am still understanding.
Therapy and Honest Self-Examination: Healing does not happen in isolation. I worked deeply with a therapist, asked hard questions of myself, and stayed in the discomfort long enough to hear the actual answers rather than the comfortable ones. I read—Dr. Gabor Maté on the connection between emotional wounds and physical symptoms, attachment theory, the neuroscience of trauma—not to intellectualize my experience but to understand it well enough to work with it rather than against it.
Learning That No One Else Can Heal Me: This was perhaps the hardest thing I understood this year—that I had, without fully realizing it, placed the weight of my healing, my security, my sense of being enough onto others who were never meant to carry that and could not have carried it even with the best intentions in the world. That is an unfair thing to do to the people you love and an impossible thing to do to yourself, because it means your peace is always contingent, always borrowed, always one conversation or one silence or one unanswered message away from collapse. The work of this year was taking that weight back fully, returning to myself the responsibility for my own wholeness, and discovering—slowly, then all at once—that I was capable of it. The peace I was looking for outside of myself was something I could actually build from the inside.
Cultivating an Emotional Peace That Does Not Shift: Not the suppression of feeling but the building of an interior climate that is genuinely steady, not tumultuous or reactive or dependent on what is happening outside me on any given day. I worked on this the way you work on anything worth having, consistently and imperfectly and with a great deal of patience for myself on the days I did not manage it. The nervous system can be regulated and emotional patterns can be rewritten; it takes time and intention and the willingness to catch yourself in the old responses and choose differently, again and again, until the new ones become natural.
Protecting My Mental Health with Real Boundaries: I significantly limited alcohol, because research consistently shows that it disrupts the nervous system regulation that trauma healing requires and lowers the emotional threshold for exactly the feelings you are trying to process—and a dysregulated nervous system simply cannot heal. I became very careful about who I allowed into my close orbit, choosing people who were steady and warm and who did not require me to perform a version of myself I was in the process of outgrowing. I protected what I consumed—what I watched, listened to, scrolled through—choosing quieter inputs and beauty deliberately, and content that expanded me rather than contracted me.
Moving My Body Every Single Day: Exercise metabolizes the stress hormones that trauma lodges in the body and creates the neurochemical conditions for genuine emotional regulation. For me, this looked like Pilates six days a week, 15,000 to 20,000 steps daily, an evening incline walk that became almost meditative, and marathon training that gave me something to build toward. I did not move my body to change its shape, but to keep it inhabitable.
Body Care as Presence: Clean, whole, homemade food almost entirely, because the gut-brain connection is heavily researched in neuroscience and what we eat directly affects our mood, our nervous system regulation, and our capacity for emotional resilience. Beyond food, tending my skin and my body with real care and attention was a daily act of saying that I am worth the time it takes to do this well. For someone healing from wounds that said otherwise, that repetition was quietly, consistently everything.
The Grace of Travel & France: I want to name this one with the full acknowledgment that I know it is not available to everyone, and I hold that with genuine humility—but I was in graduate school full time this year and still found myself, by what I can only describe as grace, physically able to heal in France. In Lourdes especially, that place where something moves that I cannot fully explain except to say that I have felt it and it is real. There is a particular healing that happens when you remove yourself from the environment where the wound occurred and place your body somewhere ancient and beautiful and holy. France gave me that more than once this year, and I am profoundly grateful for it.
Writing Children's Books: There is a therapy in creating something for children that I did not anticipate, because it requires you to distill everything down to what is most true and most beautiful and most worth saying. Every book I worked on this year asked me to locate the part of myself that still believed in goodness and wonder and love—and in finding it for the page, I found it for myself too.

On Giving Grace

I want to sit with this one for a moment, because it is the thing that freed me most and also the thing I find hardest to put into words.

There is a grace you have to learn to give yourself first—the decision to extend to yourself the same quiet compassion you would extend without hesitation to someone you love, to stop measuring your own healing by how perfectly it proceeded or how gracefully you bore what you were asked to bear, to forgive yourself for the moments you reached too hard or loved too desperately or asked more of a season than it was ever meant to give you. We are human and we are frail and we do not always know how to suffer well, and that is not a flaw—it is simply what it means to be a person moving through something too large for any one person to carry alone.

And then there is the grace you extend outward, which is harder and more costly and more quietly powerful than any other form of it. To forgive because you have come to understand—slowly, sometimes painfully—that the people who loved you through your hardest seasons were doing so without a map, in the only way available to them in that moment, which was sometimes quiet and sometimes not what you needed and faithful all the same.

To hold someone's effort more tenderly than their imperfection. To say, in your heart if nowhere else: I see what you were trying to do, I know you were doing everything you had, and I care for you more than I care for any of it.

That is grace. And giving it—really giving it, all the way down, without keeping a quiet record of what it cost you—is one of the most healing things I have ever done.

The Ocean

And then there is the healing that happened simply by being near the water.

I have spent a great deal of time in Florida this year—in Vero Beach specifically, a place that has become something I did not expect it to become, which is to say somewhere that feels like mine. There is something about the ocean that does for the soul what almost nothing else can, something about standing at the edge of something that vast and that ancient and that entirely indifferent to your problems that puts everything—the wounds, the patterns, the long hard year—into a proportion that is actually true. The ocean does not care about your grief, and somehow that is exactly what grief needs: to be held by something so much larger than itself that it finally, mercifully, stops feeling like everything.

I said yes to Vero Beach this year in a way I had not before—yes to the salt air and the slow mornings and the particular quality of light that comes off the water in the late afternoon, yes to the walks on the beach that asked nothing of me except to be present inside them, yes to the healing that happens when you place your body in a beautiful place and simply let it be there.

The research on blue space—the term used in environmental psychology for the restorative effect of being near water—consistently shows what anyone who has ever stood at the ocean already knows in their bones: that water heals something in us that land cannot reach. The nervous system responds to the rhythm of waves the way it responds to almost nothing else. There is a reason human beings have always built their most sacred spaces near the sea.

Florida has held me this year in ways I am still understanding, and Vero Beach in particular has become part of the story of who I am becoming—part of the Noellie story, part of the next chapter, part of the beautiful and still-unfolding thing that this year of healing has been quietly preparing me for.

A Year Later

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and this morning at Mass the Gospel was the story of the centurion—the Roman officer who comes to Jesus and says: "My servant is suffering." And Jesus says: "I will come." But the centurion responds: "You do not need to come, only say the word and he will be healed." He does not need proximity or proof or the visible presence of the thing he is trusting in. He simply believes the word has been spoken and turns around and goes home—and at that very hour, everything had already changed.

"As you have believed, let it be done for you."

And I arrive at her feast day today—candles lit, heart full, genuinely and completely well—as living proof that perpetual help is not a beautiful idea but a faithful, living, breathing reality.

And from that place—from the most whole and most fully myself I have ever been—I begin in Florida, at Vero Beach and the ocean and the beautiful, wide-open, sun-lit story that is just beginning to be written there. I arrive at it with nothing but an open heart, and my heart, full of love and peace.