My friend D and her husband B stopped by my studio. B has cancer. It was the first time I’d seen him since he started chemotherapy. Our hug that day wasn’t just a greeting, it was a communion.

We all cried. And then we just sat on the floor, easy and immediate. We talked about the decisions to be made. More tears. And as always, laughs. B is wickedly funny. And ridiculously tall and handsome. And on that day he was struggling with his brokenness. Feeling toppled, like only giants can.

Amidst fatigue, and skin on bones, and life with death decisions, it’s really difficult to see if you’re winning the fight or not.

Hope is always hard to spot in the wreckage. But it’s always there.@DanielleLaPorte (Click to Tweet!)

In-between his reports of being curled up in the fetal position for days at a time, feeling more in love with his wife than ever, and walking through hell itself, I reached for the most hopeful truth that I could find. It had to be hopeful and it had to be true. I said…

“I think this is what healing looks like.”

We were quiet for a while. No rush. “You know,” he nodded, tugging our heart strings together as it dawned on him, “I think this is what healing looks like.”

Isn’t it always this way? Whether a tumour is trying to ravage our bodies, or hatred is gutting the body politic. Or we’re hauling our psyche up to the next peak of clarity—isn’t healing always really f-cking messy?

Do we not become unrecognizable while we are reassembling our identities?

I’ve danced, and declared, and prayed, and wrote, and raged, and faith’d my way out of various agonies. And it was amazing to feel myself becoming more me than ever. But in-between those power-moments was some ugly terror and resentment. Bones into soup. Comfort into chaos. Commitments into dissolution.  

This is what healing looks like.

Healing is as ugly as “healed” is gorgeous. If we don’t judge the mess of it, we’re more likely to get to the other side of it sooner—and more deeply healed and stronger than we ever imagined possible. Scars and all. Healed.

Love,

Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map: A Guide To Creating Goals With Soul — the book that turned into a day planner system, a top iTunes app, and an international workshop program. A Desire Map workshop happens every weekend somewhere in the world. Author of The Fire Starter Sessions and the wildly popular #Truthbomb series, Danielle is also the co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan and co-host of the Beautiful Writer’s Group podcast.

Entrepreneur Magazine calls her “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.” A speaker, poet, former business strategist and Washington-DC think tank exec, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over four million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice — a site that’s been deemed “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality,” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes. The Huffington Post named her Twitter feed as one of the “12 of Wisest Twitter Accounts Worth Following.” You can find her @daniellelaporte just about everywhere.