It’s beginning to feel like we treat emotional healing like it’s a family road trip in December. We all hop into the car, pop on a soothing podcast and start the long drive to a destination.
Like most petulant children, we spend half the time whinging, wondering when we’re going to arrive. Trauma is cast as the dragon, happiness the maiden and us as well-spoken, sexy knights who came to slay. Once you’ve “done the work”, paid for the therapy, cold plunges and that one ayahuasca retreat, you’ll emerge reborn. A crystallised monument of serenity. Happiness preserved in amber like a mosquito in Jurassic Park.
But what if there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? No Valhalla? No Valinor? Just a Woolies queue where you wonder what your grandmother would think of the private school amagwinya you’re paying for. Even worse, what if all this healing is smoothing off all the rough edges that make you interesting? What if the end of the journey is the personality equivalent of those restaurants that look great on Instagram, but have pretty meh food — the ones that serve burgers, tacos, sushi, pasta and pizzas. The whole thing smells like a scam. I suspect that some of us are taking emotional Ozempic.
Back in the boomer era, keeping up with the Joneses meant buying ridiculous appliances; now it means performing the process of being trauma free and as emotionally unblemished as possible.
But why? It’s wonderfully noble to want to better yourself, but the problem with this idea of “getting better” is the assumption that there’s a finish line. Once you’ve run the gauntlet of self-improvement you’ll emerge as some Übermensch 2.0. But Marvin Gaye was traumatised. So was Bob Dylan and Nina Simone. In fact, so was Winnie Mandela.
This isn’t an exercise in glamourising trauma. No, there’s nothing glamorous about it. But often it’s a catalyst for incredible feats of human ability. If you ask any great athlete they’ll tell you they played through pain for most of their careers. Their fingers will be crooked and their relationships with their families won’t be perfect. They’ll probably be traumatised themselves. But greatness costs something, doesn’t it?
Maybe processing certain trauma shouldn’t be treated like some extra fat to get rid of. After all, it’s part of you — not just the negative part. Healed people don’t make gallows humour, and those jokes are brilliant. What if healing is less about getting rid of a wound and more about finding ways to tell a brilliant story about a really cool scar? After all, people’s best memories tend to start with tequila, not a discussion about attachment styles.
The other day I stumbled across something that offered a better solution. Something closer to one of those Chinese restaurants with plastic chairs run by grumpy-looking old ladies, but that serve food you could start a war over. Amusingly, it came from a divorce lawyer on a podcast meant to be about prenup war stories and bitter spouses. Instead, the lawyer delivered one of the most gorgeous diatribes on love I’ve ever heard. More than once, it stopped me dead in my tracks.
Marvin Gaye was traumatised. So was Bob Dylan and Nina Simone. In fact, so was Winnie Mandela.
— YOLISA MKELE
He said that love is one of the most irrational things humans do. Whether it’s a partner, a pet or a pair of worn-out sneakers, the truth is: eventually, we’ll lose it. Sooner or later, love always leaves. Maybe it fades; perhaps someone dies, but whenever it goes, the pain is unbearable. And yet, probably because we don’t like being healed for too long, we dive right back in. Over and over again, like idiots with hearts for crash-test dummies, hoping for a different outcome.
There’s something profoundly liberating in that. Love isn’t about permanence. Healing isn’t about completion. Both are stories we tell ourselves because we hate uncertainty. If the divorce lawyer is right, life is less about perfect preservation and more about reckless participation. We love knowing it will hurt. We heal knowing it will break again.
In the process we become the Dylans of the world. We build empires, start companies and fight wars that are spoken about 2,000 years later. We make art, become comedians and write songs. That doesn’t sound healing, it sounds like magic, and our cracked, scuffed, achy-breaky hearts are the magicians.
So if the point of healing is to become a statuesque wellness influencer who gets millions of hits by living a well-preserved and healed life, then count me out. It’s way more fun to have lived, loved and made a mess worth remembering.
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