I Didn't Know I Was Healing!

I always thought healing would be loud. Like those grand cinematic ‘before and after’ moments. You know, the kind where the music swells, tears fall, you standing on a mountaintop with arms wide open, shouting, “I’m free”, and suddenly you just… transform.  

Or maybe it’s like you read about in self-help books, a major life decision, a shiny new morning routine, maybe a few expensive therapies, or retreats in the hills. I imagined it crashing into my life, sweeping away the old and leaving me brand new.I kept waiting for my big dramatic shift. But it never happened to me.

And what I got instead was something far more subtle.

Though life wasn’t falling apart, but it wasn’t exactly flowing either. Inside my head, it was always busy, like a hundred tabs open at once. Thoughts overlapped, old worries repeated themselves like stubborn background noise.

Some were harmless (“Did I reply to that text?”), some were sticky (“What if I had done that differently?”), and some were just exhausting (“Why did I say that in 2018?”). The funny part? I didn’t even know what exactly I was looking for. Maybe a pause. Maybe clarity. Maybe peace. Or maybe just… a little space to breathe.

When Words Found Me

One evening, while making chai, I scribbled something on a scrap of paper — just a line that came to me uninvited. I didn’t even call it poetry. Not for Instagram either. It was just… me, trying to catch a feeling before it slipped away. It didn’t feel like much. Just a few words that sounded right together. But looking back, that was the first tiny crack in the wall I had unknowingly built around myself. It began in stolen moments.

On the garden path, where fallen leaves crackled softly under my steps. In a café where the tea was too strong, but the rain outside made up for it. Sitting by my room window at night, with the streetlights humming and the city still half-awake. I began writing without any pressure to be ‘good.’ Just jotting down whatever came, sometimes deep, sometimes hilariously random. Some pieces were barely three words long. Some felt like they carried a decade inside them.

I didn’t think of it as healing. I didn’t even think of it as poetry at first.

It was just… space. Space where I could put the things I didn’t say out loud.

The Moment I Noticed Something Had Changed

A few months in, a friend shared something with me that should have triggered my old habit — you know, that instinct to overanalyse, to jump in with solutions, to carry their pain like it was mine. But instead, I just… listened. We sat quietly, sipping chai, the steam curling between us. I didn’t rush to fix her feelings. I didn’t fill the silence with advice. Later that night, I thought about it. This was new. A quieter me. A gentler me. A me who didn’t need to react to everything instantly. And I realised that something had shifted.

Another time, I came across an old photo from a phase of life I’d rather not revisit. Earlier, it would have pulled me straight into the past, replaying every detail like an old film. That day, I looked at it, took a deep breath, and put it back in the box.

No storm. No self-blame. Just a quiet acceptance that it belonged to another version of me.

The Healing in Disguise

Looking back, I can now see moments where healing had quietly crept in.

It tiptoed in on evenings when the phone didn’t ring and I didn’t mind. In the middle of a poem, I wasn’t trying to write. When I stopped needing everything to make sense. When I started sleeping better without forcing a strict sleep routine. How I stopped overthinking small interactions (which, if you know me, is huge). None of these were big enough to post about. But together, they were everything.

I think poetry became my quiet medicine. It gave me a language for the mess in my head. It turned vague feelings into something I could hold in my hands, even if it was just a few scribbled lines. Somewhere between ink and paper, I had made peace with my own silence.

"Apne alfaazo mein main jazbaat padhne lagi hoon,

main khamoshi ko bhi ab sukoon kehne lagi hoon."

It’s not that poetry solved everything. Life still has its ups and downs. But it gave me something precious, a safe place inside my own mind. And over time, these little notes became a record of how I was changing. If poetry was my medicine, chai was my comfort blanket. Every cup became my pause button, a grounding reminder that not everything in life needs to match the world’s pace. Somewhere between sips and alfaaz, I found not just words, but sukoon. It didn’t knock on my door with a dramatic flourish. It just sat down beside me one day and never left.

What Healing Really Felt Like

Healing didn’t come like a thunderstorm. It came like sunlight through a curtain, slowly. Like how dawn doesn’t crash in, it just quietly replaces the dark.

That’s how it was for me. I was becoming softer without even knowing it.

No turning point.

No day where I woke up brand new.

Days I didn’t cry when I might have.

Days I spoke gently to myself instead of harshly.

Days I chose peace over proving a point.

And if that isn’t healing, I don’t know what is.

If you ask me how I healed, I wouldn’t have a straight answer.

But I could show you a notebook full of poems.

I could play you the silences I no longer fear.

I could read you a text I didn’t send and didn’t regret not sending.

I could take you to a window where I once stood anxious, and now simply watch the rain.

So, Sakhee, if you’re in a place where everything feels a bit much, trust me, you don’t need to force a big “fix.” Sometimes healing happens in the smallest, almost invisible ways. It’s about doing things that don’t demand a performance from you. And when you do, don’t worry about making it pretty. Let it be messy. Let it be raw. Let it be real.

(And yes, if that involves bad chai and crumpled pages — totally fine.)

One day, you’ll look back and see how those tiny, uncelebrated moments stitched something whole inside you. 

I still write. Not every day, not in any planned way but often enough to keep the window open in my mind. I still have moments when the world feels too loud, but now I know how to return to myself.

I once wrote poems to empty myself.

Now, I write them to remember I’m full.

I write not because I’m broken,

but because I’ve made a home in the in-betweens,

between grief and gratitude,

between longing and letting go.

I used to be afraid of stillness.

Now, I welcome it.

It tells me:

You're no longer trying to outrun yourself.

You're finally learning to sit beside your story.

May every Sakhee’s chai stay warm, her pages stay honest, and her sukoon stay intact.

- Richa Agrawal (Richa is a collector of moments, spiller of words, believer in beautiful chaos — and an unapologetic tea lover.)