Entry 13: Healing Work In Progress

Prompt: Reflect on a season in your 20s when you were doing a lot of internal work — healing, growing, building discipline, choosing better for yourself — but it felt invisible to the outside world.

My season of internal work was when I started therapy for about a year. I was overwhelmed by everything. I was frustrated for reasons I couldn’t explain. My emotions were bubbling, like boiling water on a stove top. 

Starting therapy was an intentional choice to start giving voice to what I’ve long kept silent about — I’ve heard it in my head, but never said it aloud — and giving space for my emotions to exist. It was me taking my first few steps to choose better for myself. 

Was I scared? Yes.

Scared to uncover what has long been covered.

Scared to understand what I haven’t for years.

Scared to fail — fail myself and fail others who didn’t even know I was doing it. 

I’ve never loved failure but that would be the ultimate failure for sure. 

I didn’t want to leave therapy feeling no different than when I had first started. I didn’t want to waste time or money. 

But it was one of the best things I could’ve done. It was my baby steps towards healing and planted seeds of understanding that I still refer to till this day. 

I mentioned what I learned in therapy in past entries, so I’ll stick to one new thing. I didn’t realize how heavy shame could be. And I didn’t know shame could appear even when you weren’t actually doing anything wrong, but thought you did. 

There’s a difference between saying an action is wrong and saying you are wrong. Which one do you think I’ve been doing? I don’t remember the example my therapist used, but it clearly shows the difference between attaching shame to an action versus attaching it to yourself. I’ve been labeling myself as shameful for a bucket load of reasons. 

Weight — something is wrong with me for weighing as much as I do.

Personality — something is wrong with me for going about life the way that I do.

Anxiety — something is wrong with me for worrying about the most granular things the way that I do. 

In retrospect, none of these things is wrong. They just are. Yet here I was perceiving them as so, and shaming myself for them. At some point, you don’t know where you learned to be ashamed about it, and when that narrative became your own, but it did. 

Healing is now shifting how I think — I am not the problem. 

I am not the problem: the number on the scale is, your opinion that I’m less than cause I’m introverted is, and the way my body overreacts to what it thinks are dangers can be.

But I am not.  

I’m trying to shed the shame I’ve long carried, weighing me down into the depths of the trenches. That’s a tool I learned in therapy. 

And allowing my emotions to exist was something else I learned, but that deserves an entry in itself.

One year of weekly and then biweekly sessions, and yet I only ever told two people I was doing it. 

Why no one else? Because I didn’t want the successes I felt like I had achieved, even if minor, to be dismissed and cause me to refer to my pre-therapy days. 

So, it’s been my little secret, I guess you could say, but that kept my little healing seedling safe, and now it’s blooming from within. 

Takeaway

Healing Work in Progress: Even unseen growth matters—internal shifts and small steps create the foundation for lasting healing and self-acceptance.

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Lessons from My 20s is a reflective journal-style series by Black Bonnet Girls, capturing unfiltered truths, tender moments, and awakenings about growth, healing, and self-discovery. These entries are for overthinkers, late bloomers, quiet dreamers, and loud feelers—anyone navigating the space between who they’ve been and who they’re becoming. Through storytelling, reflection, and honesty, this series offers a soft landing—for me and for you.

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