02/26/2026
The Day My Healing Began
There was a day I was certain would be my last.
Not because I wanted to die.
But because I wanted the pain to stop.
That morning, I held my child a moment longer than usual at the babysitter’s door. Their small frame fit perfectly in my arms, their thick hair brushing my face as I inhaled, memorizing them. My child was all adventure — always running, always falling, always getting back up. Their little nose was scabbed from their latest collision with the ground. Their honey-grey eyes, the color of a trout’s skin in summer light, looked up at me with complete trust.
They wrapped their arms around me again before I left.
“I love you Momma. Goodbye,” they said, their five pudgy fingers smushing into my cheeks.
I forced my voice to stay steady. “I love you too.”
I turned before they could see my face. My vision blurred as I walked to the car.
I believed I was protecting them.
The last few months had hollowed me out. I felt like a cotton ball soaked in water — heavy, shapeless, without structure. I worked in mental health. I was the one that advocated for people to find their way back. But inside my own body, I was disappearing.
I didn’t know how to get better.
I only knew I was getting worse.
I believed my children deserved a mother who wasn’t carrying this darkness. And if I couldn’t become her, I believed the most loving thing I could do was remove myself.
I drove without direction, aware of the other drivers around me, wondering if they would remember my face later. Wondering if anyone would know. Wondering if anyone could see what was happening inside me.
Then a thought interrupted everything.
Su***de doesn’t solve your problems. It just gives them to someone else.
My mind answered immediately.
Your children.
In that moment, something shifted.
The instinct that had convinced me to die — my instinct to protect my children — became the reason I chose to live.
I realized I didn’t need to know how to heal yet.
I only needed to be willing to begin.
I pulled into the parking lot of the counseling center where I worked. My hands trembled as I picked up my phone and called my boss.
“Hi Mya,” she answered gently. “What’s going on?”
That was the moment my healing began.
Not when I became well.
When I became honest.
Healing, I would learn, is not a straight path. It is crooked. It winds forward and backward. It leads you into the dark forest and asks you to stay long enough to find your own wisdom there.
There were no instant fixes. No moment where everything suddenly made sense.
There was only the decision, again and again, to stay.
To listen.
To learn my nervous system instead of fighting it.
To meet myself with compassion instead of shame.
That day was not the end of my story.
It was the day I stopped trying to escape myself and began the long, sacred process of coming home.
Everything I teach now was born from that decision.
I share this because healing is not reserved for other people.
It is available to anyone willing to begin.
Even on the day they thought they couldn’t go on.
Especially then.
