I kept waiting for the moment I would feel better. It never arrived as a moment. It arrived as a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and then a walk in the rain.
I had a very specific idea of what healing would look like. There would be a moment, a shift, when something would click into place that I’d actually feel, the way you feel a door give when you’ve finally stopped trying it with the wrong key.
That moment never came. What came instead was a Tuesday morning when I noticed I’d made myself tea without first checking whether I deserved one. It came as a walk where I looked up at the sky instead of down at my feet. And then it came on an ordinary afternoon, a laugh so real it surprised me, because of something Daisy did with a stick.
“Healing is not a destination. It is a direction.”
Healing, it turns out, isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. You don’t arrive at it. Instead, you just keep walking the way it’s pointing, and every now and then you look back and realise you’ve covered far more ground than you thought you had.
Daisy has been my walking companion through all of it. She doesn’t know she’s been doing therapy; she thinks she’s been doing walks. Maybe they’re the same thing.
The rain doesn’t bother her. She walks through it the same way she walks through sunshine; with the same complete commitment to the next smell, the next corner, and whatever small thing is waiting round it. That’s the bit I’m still trying to learn from her: how to be as present in the bad weather as in the good.