Healing doesn't mean finished

For anyone still wondering if they failed

Luis and I were on scooters, weaving through Salt Lake on our way to a tattoo convention. It was after my pre-birthday lunch. The sun was out. One of those days that feels like a gift after a long winter.

We passed a park, and I said it before I even thought about it.

“I turned 18 here.”

It’s just a park. Trees, benches, grass. Nothing that would tell you a seventeen-year-old once slept there. That he was kicked out and had nowhere else to go. That this stretch of ground holds some of the hardest months of my life.

I don’t talk about this much. I don’t revisit it. Luis knows that about me. So when I said it, he listened the way he does. Quiet. Present. No rush to fill the space. Tear’s filling his eyes. But with a grounded composure that holds the space I need to share. And then we kept riding. The sun was still out. Birds still chirping. The convention still ahead, and him next to me.

That’s the thing about being alive long enough. You can pass the place that almost broke you on the way to something good. You can hold both at the same time. The city doesn’t stop for your memory. And sometimes, neither do you.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about March.

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For years, March has been hard for me and I have ALWAYS had explanations.

The liminality of the season. The tension between winter and spring. Mercury in retrograde. Some vague spiritual weight I couldn’t name. I’m sensitive to transitions, I told myself. I’m someone who feels the in-between.

All of that is true. None of it was the actual thing.

My psychiatrist asked me this year to pay attention. To lean into the seasonal shift and notice what came up. I expected something subtle. What I got was a scooter ride and a park, and the sudden, obvious truth I had been narrating around for a very long time.

March is hard because March is when the worst of it happened.

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I have done the work. Many many many many years of it.

Therapy. Medication. Books. Meditation. Retreats. Breathwork. Journaling. Somatic practices. Some far-out things too.

I have flung myself against the wall like spaghetti, checking, always checking: Am I done yet? Am I healed? Can I stop now?

Maybe you know this version of working on yourself. The ravenous phase. The one where you get a glimmer of peace and then spend the next several months (or years) chasing it, trying everything, willing to do whatever it takes. Until you realize your wall is covered in spaghetti and you have nothing left to eat. Nothing left of yourself to spend on yourself.

I thought the goal was to get to the other side. To finish. To arrive at some point where the past didn’t live in my body anymore.

That point does not exist.

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Here’s what I’ve learned instead.

My body keeps the appointment.

Every March, my nervous system remembers. The tightening in my chest. The low-grade hypervigilance. The pulling away. I’ve realized that it’s not a flaw. It’s not a sign I didn’t do enough. It’s my body being faithful to what happened. Keeping watch. Holding the memory when I couldn’t afford to look at it directly.

For years, I treated this like a problem to solve. Something to overcome. I wanted to win against March.

And I don’t think that’s the project anymore.

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What do I have now that I didn’t have before?

I have the truth. Not the metaphysical cover story, but the real thing. March is hard because March is where the hardest parts are stored. There’s something grounding in finally letting it be what it is.

And I have witness. Luis knows now. The park has been named out loud. I don’t carry it alone anymore.

I have softness. Not because the memory is softer, but because I stopped fighting my own faithfulness. I stopped treating my nervous system like it was failing me when it was actually just showing up, every year, right on time. Like discovering someone has been leaving a candle in the window for you every March, and you just now looked up and saw the light.

And I have this: I’m still here. That seventeen-year-old in the park didn’t know that was coming. Didn’t know there would be scooters and tattoo conventions and a person to ride next to. Didn’t know March would keep arriving and that I would keep arriving with it.

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If you have done the work and you still have the thing, you did not fail.

Healing doesn’t mean finished. It never did.

Maybe the project was never meant to get to the other side. Maybe it’s to stop flinging yourself against the wall and sit down, finally, in the room with what remains. Because you remain. You.

Your body isn’t broken. It’s keeping the appointment.

You get to be whole and still have your March.

-Alex 🧡

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Maybe someone else needs permission to be whole and still have their March. Would you share this with them?

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About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.