When Weakness Feels Like Awakening: A Journey Back to Feeling
May 29, 2025
There are days when life feels like it’s systematically dismantling everything you thought you knew about your own strength. Today was one of those days.
The Strange Territory of Feeling Again
For the longest time, I existed in a kind of emotional numbness—a protective shell that kept me functional but disconnected. Now, as I’m learning to feel again, every sensation hits with startling intensity. It’s like recovering from anesthesia; suddenly aware of sensations I’d forgotten existed.
I’m discovering that healing isn’t just about getting better—it’s about learning to navigate a world where your heart can break again, where your body holds the memory of hurt, where awareness itself can feel overwhelming.
When Boundaries Break
Relationships—especially the complicated ones with people we love—can become battlegrounds where our sense of self gets tested daily. Today, someone important to me crossed a line that left me feeling used and hollow. The familiar ache of betrayal settled into my chest, and with it came a recognition: this isn’t really about what happened today. It’s about all the times in the past I allowed my boundaries to be eroded, grain by grain, until I forgot where I ended and others began.
The people we love most are often the ones capable of inflicting the deepest wounds. Not because they’re inherently cruel, but because we’ve given them the map to our most vulnerable places. Learning to love while maintaining boundaries feels like trying to build a house while living in it—messy, necessary, and requiring constant adjustment.
The Myth of Linear Progress
I keep expecting healing to be a straight line—each day a little stronger, each week a little clearer, each month closer to whoever I’m supposed to become. The reality is messier. It’s two steps forward, one step back, sometimes three steps sideways into territory I didn’t even know existed.
Some days I feel like the person I want to be: confident, purposeful, unshakeable. Other days, like today, I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s skin, playing a game I don’t remember signing up for. The temptation is to judge these weaker moments, to push them away or pretend they don’t exist.
The Paradox of Self-Care
I did everything “right” today. I nourished my body with good food, moved it with intention, paid attention to the signals it was sending me. I checked all the boxes that are supposed to add up to well-being. And yet, the spiral found me anyway.
This is perhaps one of the cruelest paradoxes of mental health: sometimes you can do everything right and still feel like you’re falling apart. Self-care isn’t a transaction where good inputs guarantee good outputs. It’s more like tending a garden—necessary, but not always immediately rewarding.
Finding the Fighter Within
There’s a part of me that knows how to push through anything—the part that doesn’t accept defeat, that thrives on challenge, that turns obstacles into fuel. I’ve felt that energy before, that sense of being unstoppable and unswayed by external circumstances.
But that fighter seems to have gone underground, replaced by someone more fragile, more human. The challenge isn’t just about summoning that strength again—it’s about integrating both parts of myself. The fighter and the feeler. The warrior and the wounded.
Moving Forward from the Mess
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and try again. Not because I have it all figured out, but because that’s what we do. We show up to our lives, even when they feel foreign to us. We practice being human, knowing that some days we’ll fail spectacularly at it.
The person I’m becoming isn’t just the strong version of who I used to be. It’s someone who can hold both strength and vulnerability, who can feel deeply without being destroyed by it, who can love fiercely while protecting what’s sacred.
The journey isn’t about eliminating the difficult days—it’s about learning to move through them without losing sight of who we’re becoming.
If you’ve ever felt caught between who you were and who you’re becoming, know that you’re not alone in this messy, beautiful process of growing into yourself.