Sometimes healing does not make you more likeable. It makes you more honest about what it costs to abandon yourself.
Sep 07, 2026
There is a side of healing nobody really prepares you for. It isn’t always beautiful. It doesn’t always look like candles, meditation cushions, affirmations beside morning coffee, or some permanently peaceful version of yourself who has finally figured life out. Sometimes healing is far less romantic. Sometimes it changes who you speak to, where you go, what you tolerate, how quickly you answer, who enters your home, and how much of yourself you are willing to give away just to keep everybody comfortable. And sometimes, strangely enough, healing makes you less likeable.
I didn’t expect that part. I thought healing would make me softer in a way everyone would enjoy. More open, more forgiving, more available and even more social. Instead, the deeper I went into myself, the more selective I became, not cold, no not distant just selective… There is a difference.
My own healing came through many doors. Art was one of the biggest. I painted things I didn’t yet know how to say. I explored meditation, sound, movement, breathwork, and different forms of integrated creative arts healing. There were emotions my hands seemed to understand before my mind could name them. Colour sometimes revealed what conversation couldn’t reach. Sound touched places language kept circling around. Meditation taught me that silence was not empty. Slowly, I began hearing myself underneath all the noise I had collected from life.
Then there was journaling. I wasn’t trying to become a writer. I was simply trying to understand myself. I wrote because something inside me needed somewhere to go. Feelings became sentences. Sentences became pages. Pages became stories. And somewhere along the way, journaling became writing. I discovered a part of myself I hadn’t fully known was there.
That is one of the strangest gifts of healing: sometimes you go looking for what hurts and find what has been waiting to live.
The more I reconnected with myself, the more I began to respect myself. Not the loud, polished version of self-love we are constantly sold, but something quieter and more difficult. I began respecting when I was tired. I respected when I needed silence. I respected when something felt wrong even if I couldn’t immediately explain why. I noticed which conversations left me heavy, which spaces made my body tense, which people allowed me to breathe normally, and which ones somehow made me feel as though I had to become another version of myself.
I started paying attention to what my soul needed and what allowed my nervous system to feel safe. And when I started listening, my energy changed.
I became more selective about the people I spoke to. The people I spent time with. The conversations I entertained. The invitations I accepted. Even the people I welcomed into my home. My home became sacred to me. I stopped treating access to my time, my space, my attention and my energy as something everyone automatically deserved.
Some people understood the change. Others didn’t.
Some wondered why I didn’t talk as much anymore. Why I didn’t answer immediately. Why I sometimes disappeared into my own world. Why I preferred a quiet evening over a crowded room. Why I stopped showing up simply because showing up was expected of me. And eventually, something beautiful happened.
I became okay with being misunderstood.
I stopped needing everybody to understand my choices before I allowed myself to make them.
There was a time when saying no required an entire explanation. I would give the reason, explain the reason, soften the reason and probably apologise for having the reason in the first place. I wasn’t only setting a boundary; I was trying to make sure the person standing on the other side of it felt completely comfortable with it.
Now, sometimes the answer is simply:
No, I can’t. And life continues.
I don’t answer every message immediately either. Not because I became arrogant or stopped caring. Sometimes I’m with my family. Sometimes I’m painting. Sometimes I’m writing. Sometimes I’m tired. Sometimes I need silence. Sometimes my nervous system has simply had enough interaction for one day.
Sometimes I just don’t feel like answering yet and that is enough too.
Through this process, I realised I am an ambivert (I wrote about it before). I genuinely love people, love deep conversations, ridiculous laughter, meaningful connections, shared stories and those conversations that begin with something completely ordinary and somehow end somewhere near the meaning of life. But I also deeply need solitude. I need art. I need quiet. I need moments when nobody is asking anything from me. I need to disappear into myself sometimes and return when I am ready.
I no longer see that as something that needs fixing.
For a long time, many of us confuse being a good person with being an endlessly accessible person. We accommodate. We explain. We show up. We say yes when something inside us has already whispered no. We become incredibly skilled at managing everyone else’s perception of us, and eventually we call that kindness.
Sometimes it is kindness.
Sometimes it is fear wearing very good manners.
That realization changed something in me.
Because healing made me look again at some of the qualities we are praised for. Sometimes patience is suppression. Sometimes being “easygoing” is fear of conflict. Sometimes extreme independence comes from never learning that it is safe to ask for help. Sometimes generosity hides a need to be needed. Sometimes the person everybody describes as so nice has spent years terrified of disappointing anyone.
So I began asking myself a different question:
Is this actually who I am, or is this who I learned I had to be?
That question can open an entire life.
I stopped asking, Will they be upset if I don’t go? and started asking, Do I actually want to go?
I stopped asking, What will they think if I say no? and started noticing what happened inside me every time I said yes when I meant no.
The answers weren’t always comfortable, but they were mine and this is where healing becomes inconvenient.
Relationships often form around invisible agreements. I will be this version of me, and you will be that version of you. Nobody says it aloud, but the agreement exists. So when one person begins changing, the relationship has to adjust. Someone who knew you as endlessly available may not understand your boundaries. Someone accustomed to your silence may not celebrate your voice.
They may tell you that you have changed and maybe you have, but sometimes what they are really noticing is that access has changed… and there is nothing cruel about that.
I see this transformation in other people now too. People somewhere in the middle of their own healing; not magically transformed overnight, but gradually becoming more themselves. Someone learns to say no without drowning in guilt afterward. Someone finally leaves a friendship that constantly empties them. Someone spends an afternoon alone and discovers that solitude is not loneliness. Someone stops apologising for needing rest. Someone finally admits, I don’t like who I become around this person.
From the outside, these things can look almost insignificant. They are not. Sometimes a simple no took years to arrive. Sometimes one boundary represents the first time someone has truly listened to themselves.
I am proud of everyone who chooses this journey, because I know it isn’t always graceful. I know because I learned much of it the hard way…I cried… I resisted.
There were things I understood intellectually but simply couldn’t do yet. I knew I needed boundaries before I knew how to hold them. I knew I needed to respect myself before I understood what self-respect looked like in ordinary life. I wanted peace while still carrying patterns that repeatedly pulled me away from it.
I know the guilt that can come after choosing yourself. I know the overthinking. I know the strange emptiness that sometimes appears when an old version of your life no longer fits but the new one hasn’t fully formed yet.
And that is exactly why I became the things I am today.
An impressionist artist. A writer. An art therapy practitioner.
To someone looking from the outside, these may seem like different identities. To me, they grew from the same soil.
I became an artist because there were things I could paint before I could explain them.
I became a writer because journaling gave my inner world a voice.
And I became an art therapy practitioner because somewhere along my own journey, I realised how powerful it can be when another human being is given a safe space to meet themselves without judgment.
I didn’t learn healing while standing safely outside of it. I experienced it.
I experienced the moments when I wanted to change but couldn’t. The moments when understanding something wasn’t enough to undo it. The moments when I had to return to the same wound, the same pattern, the same boundary again and again until something slowly shifted. That matters deeply to the way I work now. I don’t want to sit above another person and tell them how to heal. I want to sit beside them while they discover what healing means for them. Because sometimes people don’t need somebody to drag them out of what they are feeling. Sometimes they need somewhere safe enough to finally feel it, and this is especially close to my heart when I work with children.
Children haven’t seen as much of this life yet.
They are still forming their understanding of themselves, relationships, emotions, safety, rejection, anger, fear, love and belonging. They are still deciding, often without even knowing it, whether their inner world is something they can trust or something they need to hide.
A child may not sit across from you and say, I am overwhelmed and I don’t know what is happening inside my nervous system.
But they will speak.
Maybe through colour.
Maybe through movement.
Maybe through clay.
Maybe through music.
Maybe through a drawing that makes absolutely no sense to anybody else.
Maybe through silence.
But they are speaking.
And our job is not always to rush in and interpret everything for them.
Sometimes our job is simply to create enough safety for them to explore.
I don’t believe we can protect children from every difficult thing life will bring them. Nor should healing be about creating human beings who never feel sadness, anger, fear or disappointment.
What we can do is help children build a healthier relationship with those experiences before the world teaches them to be ashamed of them.
To know that sadness can be felt without becoming frightening. That anger can be expressed without becoming cruelty. That sensitivity is not weakness. That boundaries do not make them bad. That saying no does not mean they are unkind. That creativity can become a language when words are too small.
Perhaps if children learn these things while they are still children, they will not have to spend half their adulthood unlearning the belief that they must abandon themselves in order to belong.
That possibility means everything to me, and it is one of the reasons I am proud of who I am today.
I am proud of being an artist, of becoming a writer, of being an art therapy practitioner, and I am proud of what I am capable of offering another human being, not because I have mastered life, not because I never struggle, and certainly not because I have reached some mythical destination called healed. I am proud because I turned toward myself when it would have been easier to keep running.
And eventually, some of the things that helped me find my way back became things I could offer to someone else.
There is something profoundly beautiful about that.
Perhaps that is what healing can eventually become.
Not perfection.
Not endless positivity.
Not becoming universally likeable.
But becoming truthful enough to build a life that actually belongs to you.
The deeper the healing goes, the less interested we become in being chosen at any cost.
We begin choosing too.
We choose the people around whom our bodies soften. The spaces where we can breathe. The relationships in which we do not have to edit ourselves into something easier to accept.
And perhaps the question eventually stops being:
Do they still like me?
And becomes:
Can I remain myself here?
If you are somewhere inside this journey now… learning boundaries, rediscovering yourself, protecting your energy, finding forgotten talents, changing old patterns, or finally saying no where you once automatically said yes, I hope you keep going.
I am proud of you… Because healing is not necessarily about becoming someone new.
It is the long, imperfect work of peeling away everything we learned to become in order to survive, please, belong and be accepted until one day we finally meet the person underneath it all. And instead of asking that person to change one more time, we look at them and say:
There you are.
I’ve got you now.
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🌿 A quiet space, if you need one
Beyond writing, I hold space through online art therapy sessions, for those who feel deeply, but don’t always have the words for it.
This is not about creating “good art.” It is about expression, reflection, and gently understanding what lives beneath the surface.
A place to explore, release, and reconnect at your own pace.
No experience needed… only honesty.
If this speaks to you… you’re welcome here.