I have written about why I quit and how I quit.But quitting was never the destination. It was the door. A means to an end.What came after - the months of sitting with myself, the unravelling, the slow and sometimes ugly work of putting myself back together - that is the part nobody talks about enough. Because it is not linear. It is not pretty. And it does not come with a checklist you can complete and declare yourself healed.But it did come. And I want to tell you what it looked like for me.First, I Allowed The Break DownThe most counterintuitive thing I did was allow the breakdown I had been holding back for years.I allowed the breakdown to happen safely. I did not white-knuckle my way through it. I did not immediately replace the job with a project, a course, or a hustle.&nbsp;I let the structures fall away and I allowed myself to crumble.That meant I also allowed my addictions and coping mechanisms to run for a while.I am not going to dress that up or make it sound noble. When you have been holding yourself together through sheer willpower for long enough, and you finally stop, things come loose.I permitted myself to cope imperfectly while I faced what I had been coping against. The voices of self hatred are loud when you avoid them. They have power because you fear them.So I stopped avoiding them and I turned toward to face them and started asking so what?Instead of the judgement I heaped on myself, I started asking so what?I am experiencing depression – So what?I am not where I want to be mentally – So what?I am feeling anger and anxiety – So what?So what? Did the world end because I stopped? Did the sun and moon stop rising because I laid down to catch my breath and reclaim myself? What is so terrible about me needing a mental health break that I must punish myself so? What is so terrible about not know what to do, that I must tear myself apart?I Named What Was Actually HappeningOne of the most powerful things I did was to name what was happening.For a long time, I had been calling it stress, or burnout, or just "a hard season." But the truth was simpler and heavier: I was experiencing misery and depression.Naming it - not as weakness, not as failure, but as a real condition with a real name - changed everything. You cannot address what you refuse to identify.I also got better at naming each emotion I was feeling. Understanding that all emotions are information - not problems to be solved or feelings to be suppressed, but data - was a turning point. Anxiety was telling me something. &nbsp;Sadness was telling me something. Anger, most of all, was telling me something.I stopped judging my emotions and started listening to them. I created a journal as a safe space for all of it: what made me happy, what made me sad, what I was grateful for, what I was afraid of. Writing daily became the place where I could be completely honest without consequence.I kept a joy journal and a Ranting Journal. I allowed myself to see and feel all of it.Joy journal was for daily wins – getting out of bed, making it to the gym, eating fruits, not junk, any single thing that counted towards me wanting to live and live well was a win. Anything and anyone that made me happy, a text, a video, a book, a call, an activity that made me laugh. I recorded for that day.Rant Journal – More sporadically filled out for when I needed to vent unfiltered, for when rage coursed through me and needed a safe outlet, so it didn’t rip me apart.I Started To Understand Myself Better.I redid my personality and psychometric assessments – MBTI by Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, Insights, Plum Profile - not because I needed a label, but because I needed a mirror. I needed to see myself described back to me in language I had not chosen, to check whether who I thought I was still matched who I actually was.My MBTI types as an INFJ – and boy oh boy did that explain a lot.I am equal parts Blue and Red on the Insights Color wheel model.The Reformer on the Enneagram.Each of these frameworks gave me a new vocabulary for understanding why certain environments drained me completely, why I took injustice so personally, and why I had been holding myself to a standard that was quietly destroying me, especially in environments that were drama-fuelled and chaotic, and why I couldn’t work on things unless I really believed in them.I also learned about narcissistic behaviour - not to pathologise anyone, but to understand the dynamics I had been operating inside and why they had cost me so much of myself, and how to recognise it and not fall victim to it anymore.Dr. Ramani's work was clarifying in ways I had not anticipated. Gabor Mate helped me understand the connection between my body and my emotional history. Brene Brown gave me language for shame and vulnerability that I had never had before. The School of Life, Psych2Go, Mary Beth Hyland, Dr. Douglas Bloch - I read and watched and listened widely, following whatever thread of recognition I felt pulling at me.The book that sat with me most heavily was Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Also, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. &nbsp;Because it confirmed what I had felt but could not articulate: that what I had been carrying was not just in my head. It was on my shoulders, my chest, my jaw, in the exhaustion I felt.Healing was not going to be purely Spiritual, Psychological, It had to be physical too.I Started To Rebuild My Relationship With GodI re-anchored my identity and self-worth in God.This was not a retreat into religion as comfort. It was a deliberate, examined return to the foundation of who I believed myself to be. I stopped trying to earn my worth through output and acclaim and started practicing the radical idea that I was 100% worthy, all the time, regardless of my state. Not because I had achieved anything. Not because anyone had validated me. But because I was made, and that was enough.My faith in God teaches me that Joy and Peace are God’s promise to those who believe in Him.So the misery and anxiety I was feeling were not things I should accept, I cried out to God and asked Him to show me the burdens that were not mine to carry, so that I could lay them down.This question to God led me to reframe my relationship with acclaim and comparison.&nbsp;I started to recognise how much of my drive had been fuelled not by genuine passion but by a need for external approval and validation, and appearing successful in the eyes of my peers.&nbsp;I began learning to be motivated by love and by impact instead. By what I actually cared about, not what would make people think well of me.Seeking a deeper relationship with God also meant learning to trust my intuition again. I had spent years overriding it, pushing through signals my body and spirit were sending me, deferring to external expectations.Learning to trust that quiet inner voice was an act of profound God discovery and Self-recovery.I Did The Uncomfortable Inner WorkI inspected everything I was afraid of. Not quickly, not comfortably, but honestly.I looked at why I had been trying to cope and avoid for so long. I examined the inner critic - that voice that had been cataloguing my failures and inadequacies since I could not remember when - and instead of fighting it, I befriended it. Asked it what it was trying to protect me from. Understood it as a part of me that had developed for a reason, even if it had long since overstayed its usefulness.I discovered my values. Not the values I thought I should have, but the ones that were actually operating in me - the principles underneath every decision, every resentment, every moment of genuine joy. Understanding what you value gives you a compass. It also explains a lot of your pain, because pain often lives at the site of violated values.I forgave myself. That sentence is short and the process was not. But I did it.I also made restitution where it was needed - to others, and quietly, to myself.I Relearned How to Simply BeI reclaimed my relationship with rest.This was harder than it sounds. My identity had been so tightly bound to productivity that doing nothing felt like failure. Existing without output felt like selfishness. I had to actively unlearn the equation of worth with productivity, and replace it with something older and quieter: the simple right to exist.I allowed myself to do nothing. I travelled. I found hobbies - not side hustles, not self-improvement projects, just things I enjoyed for the sake of enjoying them. I read poetry, which sounds small and is not small at all. Poetry taught me to slow down, to sit inside a feeling rather than move through it as quickly as possible.I started to color. – Bought coloring books and coloring pencilsI learned Italian songs I enjoyed – Noemi, Francesca Michelin, I hear you.I reframed my relationship between my body and my health. Started treating my body as something that deserved care, not just fuel for the next deliverable.I permitted myself to fail at new things I picked up. To try things and be bad at them. Not to be impressive. To not have a plan for every outcome. Permission to choose differently than I had before, without needing to justify the change to anyone.And I promised myself, in a way that felt solemn and real, that I would love me. Not when I had fixed everything. Not when I had healed sufficiently or achieved enough or become a better version. Even as I was in the middle of the mess.I Shared My Experiences With People Who Would Treat My Story With CareI told my mother what was really going on.Her reaction reminded me that my life was sacred. Not to me alone, but to someone who loved me before I had done a single impressive thing in the world. That mattered more than I expected it to.I also befriended my father. That is perhaps an odd way to put it, but it is the most accurate. I stopped managing the relationship and started inhabiting it. There was healing in that, too - in allowing myself to receive love from my parents rather than performing “okayness” for them.Outside of my parents, I found friends who could hold space without judgement. Not the ones who would fix me, or advise me, or make my pain about their discomfort. The ones who could simply sit with me while I spoke, and let what I said be what it was. That kind of witness is rarer than it should be, and I protected those relationships carefully.I was careful with who I shared my vulnerability with. Not everyone who asked had proven they could hold grace for the pain I felt. So I didn’t explain to anyone who didn’t pass the vibe check first, no matter who they were. &nbsp;Putting speech and energy boundaries that shielded me from other people’s carelessness were important too in showing me that I deserved my own care and protection, and it became more reinforcing that I was worthy of it.What I Want You to Take From ThisIf you are planning to quit to recover from burnout or depression.I want you to understand something: quitting is the beginning of a longer and more important journey. What comes after requires as much intention as the decision to leave did.You will need to name and accept what is actually happening to you.You will need to allow yourself to fall apart before you can put yourself back together properly. And you will need to do it in a space that is protected enough for that falling apart to be safe.Surrender to God. Radical acceptance. Self-compassion. Clarity of intention. These are not soft concepts. They are hard, daily practices that ask something real of you.You will need people who can hold space without trying to fix you. You will need to learn the language for your pain - to read and listen and recognise yourself in other people's frameworks, without losing your own thread in the process. You will need to go back to the root of yourself and ask honest questions about your values, your wounds, your patterns, and your worth.But on the other side of all of it is something I did not have before: the knowledge that I can trust God and trust myself. That my identity is anchored in the unchanging view God has of me. That my intuition is sound. That my emotions are not my enemy. That I am not the worst thing I ever did or the lowest I ever felt.I am still here. I chose to stay, and then I chose to rebuild, and the building is still underway.That is the work of unlearning self-hate and learning God’s view of you is worth it.

Total Healing is Deep Personal Work that cannot be avoided. 

What I Actually Did to Heal

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What I Actually Did to Heal

What I Actually Did to Heal

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