Healing Is Necessary, Until It’s Not
On June 21, 2019, I woke up on the floor of my living room in the clothes I wore the night before, stained with mystery liquids, and zero memory on how I got home. How much I drank the night before was completely unknown, but I undoubtedly still had a dangerous amount of alcohol in my system. A dull ache reverberated through my whole body. I felt frozen, but my mind was already spinning a million miles a minute. To be brutally honest, I was absolutely fucking terrified.
My mental health was at an all-time low and that is saying a lot considering the fact that I had spent the majority of my adult life up until that point in mental downward spirals, drunken benders, showers of self loathing and praying that the age old saying “fake it til you make it” actually worked.
Moments after waking up from my drunken slumber, as I teetered the mental line of panic and hopelessness, I experienced what I can only describe as “divine intervention” or something outside of myself answering my prayers. I felt an ineffable wave of energy rush through my body. At that moment, I got up off the ground, walked myself over to the bathroom mirror, looked myself dead in the eyes and said out loud to my reflection:
“Kat, you have the power to change your life… so why the fuck haven’t you yet?”
But let’s rewind for a moment, because it’s not like I woke up one day and suddenly felt like I had lost all control over my mind and emotions.
In fact, growing up, I was a happy-go-lucky kid. My parents named me Katrina, after the band Katrina and The Waves who had the one hit wonder song: Walking On Sunshine, which from birth has been my theme song. I truly was the girl who felt like, no matter what, she was walking on sunshine and that “it was time to feel good”. The essence of my soul was playful, inspired, excited and curious… and at the exact same time, I grew up in a house with alcohol abuse, inconsistency, arguments and anxiety that echoed through the four walls my family was contained within.
In addition to what was going on at home, school often didn’t feel like a safe space. I was consistently bullied for my weight, the way I looked and that free-spirited essence that I had. (I share more about this in another post if you want to dive deeper into my story!) As much as my sunshine soul wanted to bask in the warm glow of life, the reality I landed in dampened that glow little by little.
It wasn’t until my Sophomore year of High School that I actually realized how much it had been dimmed though. In the Spring of 2011, I reached my first breaking point where I started experiencing suicidal ideation for the first time. I had seen myself as a “pillar of strength” (I literally wrote an essay about myself using those exact words that same year for an English Class assignment), but the pillar had cracks in it and started crumbling down.
It was during this time that I was first introduced to therapy, mindfulness and “healing work”. Therapy was deeply stigmatized still at this time, it was seen (especially in a small agriculture town in Colorado) as something for “people who had something wrong with them” which further exacerbated the pain I was feeling because I had a desperate desire to be accepted and seen as someone “normal”. Nonetheless, I went to therapy, at first twice a week, then once a week, then biweekly, then once a month, for about a year until I felt like I could stand on my own two feet again.
Fast forward a bit, I moved away from my hometown and my early twenties became a cycle of chasing highs and outrunning lows… trying to quiet the voices that followed me everywhere. Usually in the bottom of a bottle, in the thrill of manipulating my way into the hearts and beds of many men, in doing things that looking back still make me cringe with disbelief. But my tactics only ever worked for short periods of time.
The mindfulness techniques or meditative practices I learned in therapy were incredibly valuable for those years I was in high school, yet long term it felt like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. It was enough to stop the bleeding for short periods of time, but ultimately wasn’t the genuine healing to the deep-seated problems and traumas that I had pushed down since childhood. The kind of trauma that would rear its head in the form of crippling anxiety and suicidal ideation every few months for just over 8 years, no matter how many therapists I saw, until June 21st 2019.
After making that bold declaration, out loud to myself in the mirror that morning, that same wave of energy seemed as though it stayed with me through the rest of the day. I dragged my hungover ass to put on fresh clothes, a pair of hiking shoes and headed out the door. I hiked up the foothills that overlooked the city, and it was at the top of the hill that I made a second bold declaration:
“I will do whatever it takes to turn my life around.”
I meant it, with every ounce of my being, because obviously what I was doing up until this point in time wasn’t working. It was in that moment, on that hill, at the lowest point of my life thus far, that I made the promise to myself that I would commit the next 365 days to finding a new way. I didn’t know it in that moment, but that promise became the beginning of a life greater than I could have ever imagined.
And so the journey into healing began… from learning all about manifestation and The Law of Attraction, to taking a deep dive into the subconscious mind, how our perception of the world and belief systems are formed during childhood, the metaphysical realm, energy work, woo-woo shit, and so much more. My life started to change so drastically so quickly, the glow of my sunshine soul started waking back up, I started sharing my story on social media with anyone and everyone who wanted to listen to all of these life changing tools that I had discovered. I invested thousands upon thousands of dollars (that admittedly I did not have, but luckily credit card companies did LOL) into working with coaches, healers and mentors that helped me not only heal for myself, but also build a life coaching company that’s helped hundreds of people with the same sort of healing.
In less than a year I went from being a barista/cafe manger to a 6-figure life coach, I went from feeling like I was drowning in anxiety and hopelessness to building a true sense of self for the first time since childhood, I went from feeling broken to believing in myself. Yet, there was still something that felt like it was missing. At first, I thought it was money that would fill the void… that if I made more money, then I would feel happier. But as I scaled my business and made more money than I had ever made before, I actually started to feel more empty. Not because the money wasn’t amazing, it absolutely was, but because I had put so much pressure on money and external achievements “fixing” me and making me “whole” again.
On December 24th 2020, I ended up hiring a life coach that completely changed my life, for the better, forever. While all of the other coaches I had worked with up until that point were focused on healing, i.e. addressing pain, self-talk, inner child healing, etc. he was focused on living. The kind of “healing work” we did together was different, almost like taking a plant medicine trip into my psyche to identify not necessarily what I needed to “heal” from, but what was stopping me from living. Deprioritizing healing and choosing to live was disgustingly uncomfortable at first. Like stomach turning over when you get a surprise text from your ex kind of uncomfortable. I felt like I was doing something wrong, like something was missing, like the “moral police” were going to knock down my door and yell at me for not constantly trying to fix myself, heal more trauma and be a more “enlightened” or wealthy person.
The over-achiever in me wanted him to give me homework after every session that would “accelerate” my progress, and each time he would give me a little smirk and send me away with the words “your only job this week is to live fully and notice anything that stands in the way of you being able to do that”.
In the absence of filling my days with endless to do lists of “healing rituals”, journaling, meditations, dates with my inner child, praying to God and a whole bunch of other stuff you’d read about in a self help book, I honestly felt like I was dying a little bit. That all of the “progress” that I had made on myself was going to vanish and that it was foolish of me to think that I was ready for this.
Many days I felt like throwing in the towel and going back to the comfort I found in endlessly consuming content from wellness gurus. I felt like buying into and believing the parts of my mind that were convinced that I wasn’t healed enough yet. But as I sat in the tension of my discomfort and desire to run, I had the realization: no amount of “healing” was ever going to bring me the level of fulfillment or freedom I was seeking. That only in learning to fully accept myself as I was, without trying to perfect myself, that I would truly feel whole.
For 2½ years, I met with him weekly to dive deeper into reconnecting with the true essence of my soul, learning to trust my intuition and getting closer to my own inner guidance system. Finally instead of trying to fix myself, I started to accept myself. The highs, the lows, the beautiful and the ugly; I started to see that it was ALL a part of living. That living wasn’t about pleasantly prancing through life like the “world of healing” and spirituality had promised me, but instead being okay with the fact that truly living meant experiencing the full spectrum of what life has to offer.
Since then, life has been a mumbo-jumbo of heartbreak, miracles, vulnerability hangovers (not real hangovers, I quit drinking in 2022), self isolation, some of the best vacations, the best sex, the best big belly laughs with my friends. I’ve taken risks and then backed out. I’ve followed my heart and then self-sabotaged. I’ve, without a doubt, changed my mind a million times. It hasn’t been one way or another… it’s been all of it.
It’s been a delicious mixture of booking impromptu trips to upstate New York just so I can touch some grass, late night conversations with my best friends where we spill the depths of our guts out to each other without an agenda, slow mornings reading in bed while I know the rest of the world is working, crying my eyes out on the subway over hot guys and so much more.
In full transparency, I think life has been messier in some ways than ever before. But the difference is now, that I have been more okay with it because I no longer need my life to be “perfect”, or controlled by external standards. My mind, my heart, my soul, my life… it is mine again. When I stopped seeing myself as an endless project to “fix” and instead saw my life as a giant canvas for abstract, imperfect, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible art to be created, that’s when I finally started living on my own terms.
When I look back to June 21st 2019, I recognize that as the moment that healing became a non-negotiable. There is no possible way that I could sit here today and write this if it was not for the years spent addressing my past, deconstructing the limiting beliefs and false stories I had about myself and what was possible for my life. As well as processing the trauma that I was holding onto on the cellular level of my body. But what has actually allowed me to “walk on the sunshine” again, was closing the door on my “healing journey” and embracing the art of living: the mess, the magic and everything in-between.
In recent years, I’ve seen an over glorification of the healing journey on social media. This idea that is sold (especially to women) that if they clear their “blocks”, embody their “higher self” and own their “power” then they can have an idealistic life where nothing bothers them or brings them down. AND that if things are still triggering them or bringing them down then that means they’re not healed enough. I think this narrative is complete bullshit and used to manipulate people.
I still notice myself buying into it sometimes… this idea that the reason I am not where I want to be in life yet is because I still have “blocks” that I need to heal. Honestly, it’s hard not to believe that story when it feels like anyone who seemingly has their shit together on social media tends to shove it down the throat of the masses. It honestly makes me sad, it makes me pause, but inevitably it brings me back to the blatant fact that:
Healing is not the point of life.
The point of healing is to live. Of course, there is a time and a place for healing… but eventually perpetually focusing on it becomes a distraction from just living. What once freed you becomes a cage. What is considered a “good thing” turns sour. Life isn’t always pretty, and there ain’t no amount of “healing work” that can change that. But while life might not always be pretty, it is always worth living.
I don’t think the version of myself that was lying half drunk, half hungover yet fully scared on the floor of my apartment could have ever imagined that I would be saying this… I don’t think she thought I’d ever get to a place where I feel whole. But I think that’s actually what makes life the greatest gift of all. It’s unpredictable, and the more you try to take the mystery, the vastness, the full fucking spectrum of everything out of it, the more you miss out… and I have a feeling if you’re still reading this, you really don’t want to miss out on the magic that life is. So go live your life bestie, you deserve it.
xo, Kat
