I’ve always been accustom to measuring growth sequentially. Whether it was adding more miles during my marathon training, or counting the number left in a stack of essays to grade, I measured my progress by the increase in number completed. However, my healing journey has forced me to measure my success differently. According to my old method, my healing would progress if each day I felt better than the day before. Yet, I recently had a setback in my healing journey and had to remind myself to use a different measure of success. I had a day that made me feel as if I was all the way back at square one. It felt like I had been climbing a mountain and just as I reached the summit, I suddenly slipped and began to free fall to certain death if it were not for my carabiners and safety harness.

There I was all the way back at the base of the mountain and the thought of starting the climb over again seemed so daunting that the idea of giving up all together felt much more appealing. Luckily I was reminded of a message my Instagram algorithm likes to send me which states: Healing is not linear. And just like that, it was clear that I was not at the bottom of the mountain but rather temporarily suspended in the air ready to reconnect with the mountain surface after a much needed respite from climbing. The setback in my healing journey felt like the end of the world but it wasn’t. I did not have to start over from scratch. I was able to pick up right where I had left off. My measure of success is not feeling exponentially better from day to day but by how quickly I can recover and get back on track.