The Cost of Curated Healing
The Pressure, the Platform, and the Pushback
A strange kind of pressure comes with trying to be well in public. Not just to be okay, but to appear whole—consistently, attractively, in a way that translates on a screen. These days, healing has an aesthetic. It's branded in earth tones and curated captions. It lives on soft timelines full of somatic language and filtered vulnerability. And while the intention may have started from something real, the performance of healing has quickly become a hustle.
Wellness isn't just something we pursue anymore. It's something we're expected to prove.
I'm not here to critique the people building platforms around healing. Some of them are my people. I know how deeply some of us have bled to arrive at the softness we now share.
If you've done real healing work—the kind that drags you through yourself and demands you make peace with every version of who you've been, and who you thought you would be—you know it isn't always beautiful. It isn't always "shareable." It doesn't always align with the algorithm. And yet, here we are, caught in a culture that rewards performative transparency more than actual process.
I've done the work. And then I've had to sell the work. And then I've had to protect the work from being flattened into something it never was. I've ghostwritten stories about transformation that made healing sound like a straight line. I've helped brands wrap grief in bows because rawness wouldn't convert. I've built messaging around breakthrough moments that hadn't fully broken through yet. Somewhere along the way, storytelling stopped being sacred. It became strategy.
Reflection became a deliverable. Growth became a niche. Healing started needing a call-to-action.
I've watched therapy-speak migrate from private practice to pitch decks—corporate teams "holding space" while gutting their most human voices for the sake of brand tone. Even softness gets marketed now, only to be abandoned when the metrics dip.
Even rejection has been repackaged. A "lesson." A pivot point. A setup for something greater. But rejection isn't always a plot twist. Sometimes it's just a closed door.
A devotional I wrote—about rejection, of all things—was turned down because it didn't go deep enough. Because it said something familiar when what was needed was something true. And I understood. The feedback hurt, but it was right. It reminded me that honesty without edge is just echo. That clarity has to cost something.
I've felt what it's like to offer something vulnerable—only to watch it be misunderstood, or worse, ignored. I've had doors close so quickly that I wasn't sure if I imagined the invitation. There's no template for that kind of grief. No Canva graphic for being unwanted. No platform that can carry the weight of that silence.
But I've learned that some of the most profound shifts I've experienced came in moments that looked like nothing at all: journaling through a spiral I couldn't yet name, letting myself cry in the middle of the day without folding into shame, choosing not to turn my story into a lesson while it was still a wound—choosing not to post through it. Not to package it. Just to be in it.
We don't often name that as work because it doesn't scale. It doesn't trend. There's no content strategy that accounts for days where the only success is not collapsing. But it's still labor. Spirit-deep, uncomfortable, often unnoticed labor.
But healing isn't just something I've written about. I've had to sit with it in ways I never consented to. Some days, it has felt like the only work I know how to do.
It’s messy here – a spoken word poem by Dani Williams
Even now, I'm navigating what it means to grieve a version of my future that may never arrive. I was raised in a world that told me exactly what family was supposed to look like—nuclear, obedient, God-ordained, and scripted. The Jehovah's Witness framework shaped my earliest language around belonging, but it also carved me away from bloodlines, from autonomy, from permission to want anything outside its walls. And yet, even inside that rigid system, I had closeness. My parents. My sister. I knew what it meant to be surrounded by people who felt like home.
I've carried that ache for home into adulthood, into partnerships, into nearly-parenting other people's children, sometimes for years at a time. And still, none of them are mine. There are no children I get to claim. No little ones who call me by name without hesitation. I have been the extra. The almost. The not-quite. And even now, in a long-term relationship where love is real and steady, I don't know if I will ever truly be a part of that family's fabric. I remain stitched to the edges, careful not to pull too hard on what's already been sewn.
That ache—that hunger to belong, to be seen as central—has shaped so many of my choices. I have self-sabotaged not with recklessness, but with resignation.
I've stayed in roles and relationships that kept me small, not because I didn't know better, but because being invisible there felt safer than being rejected elsewhere. I've chosen comfort that came with conditions over growth that came with risk.
And I've turned away from myself—not in a single moment, but over years. Decades. Sometimes out of fear. Sometimes out of exhaustion. Sometimes because I couldn't yet bear to face my reflection.
And that reflection has never been a neutral thing. This body—my body—has long been a site of struggle. Not just with shape or softness, but with presence. I have spent years trying to make it smaller, quieter, easier to clothe and control. I've been praised when it disappeared and punished when it dared to expand. Even now, after all the work, I am still learning how to live inside myself without apology. I am still learning how to see this skin as mine—not a negotiation, liability, or project. Just mine.
The culture rewards healing that can be commodified. It favors growth that photographs well. If you're grieving, make it poetic. If you're in process, make it palatable. If you're in pain, make it productive. Even burnout has been branded. Rest is now marketed as rebellion, but only if you document it. Only if it matches the tone of your grid.
But healing—real healing—resists spectacle. It doesn't want an audience. Sometimes it doesn't want language. It asks for your presence, not your performance.
I cannot offer answers here. I'm writing this simply to name something that keeps slipping between the cracks: healing is not a phase. It is not a platform or a promotional tool. Healing is work. Not metaphorically. Not in theory. But in a way that rearranges your insides before it ever touches your outside.
It's about choosing to stay with yourself when no one else does. Again and again. Without needing the story to be easy, resolved, or public.
There's no landing here. Just the truth that the most sacred work rarely shows its receipts. And maybe that's the point.
This piece was written alongside the release of my newest commissioned piece, "It's messy here." If this essay spoke to something in you, the poem might too. Watch it here →
