Healing Doesn’t Have to be Aesthetic

Healing does not have to be aesthetic. In fact, sometimes it's not going to be. Hi, my name is Rachel Havocost. I'm a writer, a mental health advocate and I've been in therapy for like 19 plus years for my mental health. And something that I have noticed recently is this trend in social media around healing and wellness, which on the one hand I'm so, so, so glad about because it means that we're talking about mental health. It means that we are seeing, seeing mental wellness as a positive thing and something to prioritize, just like our physical health.

And I think that that is so cool. At the same time, we're seeing these really aesthetic versions of healing. We're seeing beautiful candles being lit, really clean bedrooms, meditating, practicing yoga, wearing very like expensive clothing, skincare routines that, that seem impossible to attain. And this sort of narrative that healing is like a glow up. Like it has this sort of like visual, like a visual sort of ascension along the internal ascension. And I think that that's really doing us a disservice because while so much external beauty can happen in our lives, when the internal starts to heal, it is really, really messy and sometimes really, really ugly.

Like when I am in the midst of, of depression or anxiety or grief and I am trying to recover from that and move through that, those dishes are not done. They are piled up in the sink. That trash has not been taken out in a while. My bedroom looks like crap. My laundry is super smelly. I haven't, I haven't like tried to put my face together in a couple, you know, like when I'm in that state, I'm not, I don't look aesthetic. Nothing in my life looks aesthetic. It looks incredibly disheveled and I'm oftentimes very overwhelmed.

And I think that it's really important for us to remember that what we see on social media is this much and oftentimes it's a reenactment or an acted out, staged scene to tell a story. A lot of social media is marketing and advertising, even if it's an influencer. I'm guilty of this myself. I have absolutely staged videos for things on my social media. And so I think it's really important for us to remember that these are stories that are representing something and don't actually always show the truth.

So if you see these aesthetic videos of healing or wellness and it makes you feel bad about yourself because your life doesn't look like that while you're going through a healing process, that is, that is okay. It does not need to look like that. And in fact, the majority of the time, it doesn't, especially if we're talking about serious mental illness. So please, give yourself grace for whatever that healing journey looks like for you, because it does not need to look aesthetic whatsoever.