DIANA MARIN

Tag: healing journey

  • Gratitude Journal Entry No. 4

    There is a particular quality to gratitude that asks nothing of us but presence—a dwelling in the somatic fact of aliveness itself, in its quiet insistence, its refusal to announce itself with fanfare. Today I feel grateful for the simple, ongoing act of being alive. In the quiet, embodied sense.

    I am grateful for the way the world continues to offer itself in fragments: a cup of hot chocolate, a familiar street corner, a moment of inner calm that would have once felt unreachable. I’m grateful to live in this small world I’ve arranged into beauty, decorated like a studio from elsewhere, a sanctuary that exists slightly outside of time.

    I’m grateful to be on a path of self-discovery. What I have come to understand is that I am engaged not in a project of self-improvement—that teleological fantasy of becoming someone other—but in something more akin to return. A slow reorientation towards what I might call the “true self,” though I prefer to think of it as a kind of archaeological practice: the careful excavation of accumulated sediment, the brushing away of narratives that were never mine to begin with. Old stories. Inherited anxieties. Roles adopted out of necessity rather than authenticity. Beneath these accreted layers, something remains. Something that does not require performance as the price of its existence.

    There is potency in the symbolic architecture of beginnings. 2026 arrives as threshold, as demarcation, as invitation. We mark these temporal boundaries because we are meaning-making creatures, because the nervous system responds to ritual, because we need to believe—perhaps must believe—in the possibility of choosing again.

    I’m grateful for the coming of spring, my favourite season, even if it’s still far away. Grateful for the idea of the first snowdrop—that small, defiant softness pushing through frozen earth, insisting that life continues. I like how spring arrives as a gradual uncoiling, a softening, a release. A slow permission. A gentle undoing of winter.

    I’m grateful for what I’m learning to let go of.

    Letting go of the emotional baggage that no longer deserves a permanent room inside me. Of the patterns I carried because I didn’t know what else to do. Of survival strategies that have outlived their utility. The distinction between what I learned in order to survive and what I am learning in order to live. Letting go is not always clean, linear, instantaneous, redemptive—sometimes it’s a series of small releases, repeated over time, until the nervous system begins to trust that the present is not merely a continuation of the past.

    I’m grateful to exist exactly as I am.

    Not as a future version. Not as the more polished, more healed, more “sorted” self that haunts self-help discourse. Simply as a woman engaged in the ordinary work of living—learning, creating, becoming, and also remaining constant in the ways that constitute continuity of self. To be allowed complexity. To be permitted ordinariness. To be real.

    I’m grateful for the privilege of distance from what harms me.

    For possessing sufficient autonomy to step away from what destabilises, to curate not just my physical environment but the subtler architecture of inputs, relationships, temporal rhythms. To treat sensitivity as a form of attunement worth protecting rather than as pathology requiring correction. This is not equally distributed, this capacity for choice. Safety is unevenly allocated. And yet here it arrives in my life: the possibility of choosing softness rather than armour.

    And I’m grateful to do the work I’m meant to do.

    The work that feels like it has a pulse. The kind that aligns with my values, my mind, my aesthetics, with the longing to transform experience into something that resonates beyond the merely personal. I am grateful that creativity persists, that it continues to return even after periods of dormancy, that it keeps insisting I pay attention.

    Mostly, I’m grateful for this: that life still feels possible.

    That even as the past exerts its gravitational pull, the future continues to call. That fear and forward motion can coexist. That tenderness and strength are not opposites but companions. That I can be here—breathing, becoming, being—and let this be sufficient. Let it be enough.

  • Rethinking Fulfillment

    We treat satisfaction like a finish line — permanent, polished, waiting for us if we hustle hard enough and heal “right”. And yet, what if that’s the wrong map? What if satisfaction isn’t a destination at all — rather, a weather pattern: passing through, beautiful when it visits, impossible to domesticate?

    What if the baseline isn’t seamless fulfillment?

    Psychoanalysts called it jouissance: those bright, disorienting flashes of more-than-pleasure that visit and vanish. We get moments, not permanence. Yet we keep trying to retrofit life into a continuous high: more goals, more apps, more “optimised mornings”, more distractions polished to look like purpose. We stack our calendars like sandbags against an inner tide we don’t want to feel.

    And then something tears through the fabric. The diagnosis. The layoff. The quiet Tuesday you crumble for no obvious reason. The void you’ve been outrunning steps into the doorway, and the light goes strange. It feels like descent — like a cold, locked crypt — but it’s also a threshold. The ache isn’t evidence that you’re failing at life. It’s evidence that you’re alive.

    We’re not built for perpetual plenitude. Every wisdom tradition has said this in its own dialect: dukkha, exile, the wound that opens the heart. Jung mapped it as shadow and descent. Lacan called it lack. Mystics describe a dark night where the old scaffolding collapses so something truer can breathe. Different names, same contour: there’s a gap at the core of things. We suffer when we try to plaster over it. We grow when we learn to relate to it.

    So here’s the unsettling invitation: stop trying to seal the crack. Sit beside it. Let the draft move through you without rushing to fix the windows. Notice how much of your life is designed to outrun this exact feeling – the tabs, the tasks, the tiny screens that promise relief but deliver numbness. Notice the bargains you make with yourself: “When I get there, I’ll finally feel whole”. There is no there. There is only here, and the momentary sweetness that visits like birds at dusk.

    This isn’t a call to resignation; it’s a call to intimacy. To meet the void is to meet yourself without costume. It’s to put down the role of the one-who-has-it-together and become the one-who-is-honest. It’s to trade the anesthesia of certainty for the medicine of contact. Paradoxically, that’s where steadiness lives — inside the willingness to feel the wobble.

    Look around: when we refuse the ache, we outsource it. We build cultures that run on distraction, economies that monetise our longing, feeds that flood the cavity with glitter until we forget it’s there. The collective chaos is the echo of a shared refusal. We think we’re avoiding darkness; we’re manufacturing it at scale.

    What shifts when we stop? When we let the void speak in plain language?

    Sometimes it says: Rest. Sometimes: Tell the truth. Sometimes: Cry. Sometimes it says nothing at all, and you learn to sit with silence without turning it into a problem to solve. You breathe in the unfinishedness and, somehow, it stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like a horizon.

    Practically, this looks smaller than your ego wants. It’s making hot chocolate and tasting it. It’s putting your phone in another room and letting loneliness introduce itself by its real name: longing. It’s prayer without performance. It’s a page in a journal that doesn’t have to be profound. It’s a walk where you practice being a body, not a brand. It’s telling a friend, “I don’t need advice; I need witness.” It’s letting satisfaction be an unexpected guest, not a lease you’re trying to secure.

    And when the next tear comes — as it will — you’ll recognise the terrain. You’ll know that the crypt has a back door, that the darkness is not empty but full of seeds. You’ll remember that you don’t climb out by force; you grow out by contact. The more you befriend the gap, the less power it has to terrify you. Not because it disappears, but because you do not abandon yourself inside it.

    Maybe this is the quiet revolution: to stop demanding wholeness behave like a product, and start letting it behave like a rhythm. To become someone who can hold sweetness without gripping and hold sorrow without drowning. To build a life that isn’t a fortress against pain but a hearth that can host it.

    You don’t have to wake the whole world up. You don’t have to prove you’ve “healed”. You don’t have to turn your ache into content. You just have to strike one small match in the dark room of your own life and look honestly at what’s there. The flame won’t seal the crack. It will make it visible. And in that light, you might find a needle and thread.

    Not to stitch the world shut — but to stitch yourself to it. To the gap, to the gust, to the gorgeous, fleeting weather of being here.

  • Healing: A Gentle Unfolding

    I’ve walked through the terrain of healing, and if there’s one thing I’ve come to understand, it’s this: healing isn’t linear. It may come in recognisable stages, but it doesn’t follow a timeline. It loops back on itself, unfolds unevenly, and often catches you off guard.

    It moves in layers. Cycles. Spirals. It stalls and it surges — often revisiting the same path from a new depth.

    It can feel like progress one day, and total regression the next. But what I’ve learned is that every part of the process — every step forward, every stumble, every still moment — is part of the return.

    The return to yourself.

    Even when it feels like everything has fallen apart, what people are really in is a sacred unfolding. A slow, aching, deeply intelligent movement towards healing. They are falling into alignment.

    Healing doesn’t come all at once.

    It reveals itself in waves, in seasons, in ambiguous moments.

    It comes in that morning you wake up and realise you’re not bracing for the day ahead.

    In the sudden softness of your breath when someone holds your hand without you pulling away.

    In the moment you let the tears come — not out of despair, but relief.

    And it doesn’t begin with joy. It begins with honesty.

    The first stage of healing, for many, is rupture.

    That moment something breaks — a relationship, a belief, your nervous system. Sometimes, it’s loud. Other times, it’s the quiet hum of “I can’t keep doing this anymore.”

    Then many enter a state of shock. You might be filled with a thousand emotions all at once: disbelief, pain, rage, confusion. The ground feels shaky. The body instinctively retreats into itself. Let it. Meet the vulnerability with presence, otherwise…

    Then comes the resistance.
    This is the part we don’t talk about enough. The pushback. The “maybe I’m fine.” The instinct to numb, distract, avoid. It’s not weakness. It’s protection. The body’s way of saying, “I’m scared.”

    Then comes the numbness. The protective freeze. The disbelief. You go through the motions. You’re functional, but far from whole.

    Then comes the awareness…A flicker of knowing that something doesn’t feel right. That the ache you’ve been carrying wasn’t always there. That the exhaustion isn’t just from a bad week, but a buildup of years. Recognition… A dawning sense that something important is surfacing. That the story you’ve lived with isn’t the whole story. And with recognition comes acceptance — not the kind that makes everything okay, but the kind that says, “this is mine, and I can face it now.”

    What follows is grief — deep, confusing grief. Grief for the things that happened, yes. But also for the time you lost pretending you were okay. For the versions of you that never got to bloom.

    After that, often, comes anger. Rage, even. The fire. The “why didn’t anyone protect me?” The “how dare they?”

    Anger is not the enemy. It is sacred information.

    It protects your boundaries before you know how to. It says: “I deserved better.”

    It comes in waves, or sometimes all at once. And while it’s not easy, this is the part where things begin to shift. The dam cracks. Emotion moves.

    After the fire, sometimes there is emptiness. A hollow quiet where the old self used to be. This is not a failure — it’s the shedding. The space left behind when you let go of what doesn’t work for you.

    And finally, slowly, there is softening.

    Not forgiveness, necessarily. Not forgetting.

    But space.

    You place gentle distance between the wound and your identity.

    You begin to see yourself not as what happened to you — but as the one who survived it, felt it, held it, and lived. As the awareness behind.

    That’s when integration begins.

    You start living again. Differently. More slowly. More consciously. More bravely.
    You try new ways of being. You stumble, relearn, adapt. And it’s hard. But it’s worth it.
    You practice micro-choices that add up: Breathing deeper. Saying no. Staying when it’s safe. Leaving when it’s not. Replacing old reflexes with new rituals.

    The nervous system settles. It learns safety. Joy peeks its head around the corner. Not the loud kind, but the quiet joy of being present in your life. Of tasting food. Watching films. Catching a captivating scent. Appreciating nature. Of laughing without effort.

    And then comes release.
    A deep exhale.
    Not because everything is fixed — but because you no longer have to hold it all so tightly.
    You recognise that this moment, just as it is, holds you. And that’s enough.

    Eventually, transformation comes.
    Rather than as a grand event, it comes as the subtle, gradual, daily choosing of something new.
    You rearrange your life in a way that honours who you’re becoming.
    You build your world around your truth.
    There’s no need to hurry. Even the smallest steps can lead to profound shifts.

    You start choosing.

    This journey is not linear. You may circle back, feel like you’re unraveling again, question whether you’ve made any progress at all.

    But each time, the return is different. Quicker. Wiser. Kinder.

    Healing is a relationship, not a destination. A relationship you nurture over time. One that asks for your presence more than your perfection.

    I used to think healing was about fixing myself. Now I know it’s about finding myself again.

    The parts I abandoned to survive. The softness I tucked away.

    Healing is a series of moments where you choose to come back to yourself, again and again, with love.

    And when that love is mirrored by the right people — by safety, by attunement, by presence — something incredible happens…

    Your nervous system is shown, again and again, a different story. Through the repeated experience of safety, love, and presence — enough times for your body to finally believe: it’s over now.
    And you begin to believe you’re worthy of healing.
    And you are.
    Always.

    Healing doesn’t mean we forget what hurt us. It means we hold it with more care. We bring it to the light.

    We meet it with kindness.

    Wherever you are in this process, know this:

    You’re not late.
    You’re not failing.
    You’re healing.