When Healing Stopped Arguing

I was reading a text about concentration.
Nothing in it was unfamiliar.

Still, something tightened.

Not disagreement.
Recognition.

I noticed how easily attention can turn into a task —
how care can slide into monitoring,
how hope can begin to sound like instruction.

There was a time when I believed my body was waiting for me to become different.
That healing meant arriving somewhere else.
That if I listened correctly, concentrated well enough, aligned myself properly,
this version of me would no longer be here.

Those ideas didn’t begin with me.
They were already present —
in medicine, in spirituality, in stories about effort and worth and improvement.

I learned to measure myself against them.

I still live with CRPS.
It flares.
It shifts.
It does what it does.

What changed was not the condition.
It was how I listened.

A different question appeared one day:
What if healing is different than I think it should be?

That question didn’t fix anything.
It made room.

I stopped assuming the body was a mistake.
I stopped treating persistence as failure.
I stopped arguing with what was already here.

I noticed I was healing into what existed, not away from it.
Nothing was diminished by that.

Listening replaced fixing.
Gentleness replaced urgency.

The stories that told me I should be different grew quieter.
In their place was permission —
to be unfinished,
to be imperfect,
to remain intact.

That was enough to keep going.

→ Healing Without Disappearance