I’m tired of the word “healing.” Truly. It’s become the new “hustle.”
We’ve gone from “grind until you break” to “heal until you’re perfect,” and honestly? It feels like the same job, just with better lighting and a lot more crystals.
Take this for example. I saw a “healing holiday” package. A holiday. Like the trauma is just a bug that can be patched out if you spend a few thousand dollars in Greece.
It’s not just the holidays. It’s the whole industry. Tatrose put it perfectly on Substack: the wellness industry is now a $4 trillion business. It’s not about relief anymore; it’s about selling the idea that you can fix your suffering if you just buy the right supplement or follow the right morning routine. They’ve even created “fake therapy talk,” where clinical terms like “gaslighting” and “trauma” are just social media buzzwords used to win arguments.
“The wellness industry, now worth over $4 trillion globally, thrives on selling people the idea that they can fix their suffering if they just buy the right product, take the right supplement, or follow the right morning routine.”
And then there’s the noise. I saw a hashtag for #healing with nearly 50 million posts. 50 million. When a word is used that much, it stops meaning anything. Janelle Rigby wrote about how this turns healing into a marketable buzzword, blurring the line between actual recovery and just “feeling good in the moment” because you took a bath.
“Real healing, by contrast, is rarely aesthetic or easily packaged for social media. It often involves difficult, unglamorous work that might not look ‘instagrammable’.”
The danger is when the “healing journey” becomes your entire identity. When you stop being a person and start being a “patient” for life. Sacred Anarchy hit the nail on the head: suffering has been successfully rebranded as an identity.
“Wellness expands every year, not because humanity is healing, but because suffering has been successfully rebranded as an identity.”
Look, some of this stuff helps. But the moment your “healing” feels like a checklist, a career, or a purchase, you’re not healing—you’re just optimizing your pain.
Stop trying to “fix” the part of you that’s actually just human. If you’re tired of the treadmill, come check out my thoughts on the violence of healing.
Let’s just be messy for a while. It’s a lot less exhausting.