Nothing that has actually healed in me has healed quickly. I used to think that was a failure of faith, some deficiency in how hard I was praying or believing or trying. Now I think it might be closer to the only way mending has ever worked, in me or in anyone I have watched closely enough to trust the account.
There is a kind of healing sold as instantaneous, a before and after with nothing in between, and I do not doubt that some things do resolve that way. But almost everything I would call real repair in my own life has looked more like a bone knitting than a switch flipping: slow, invisible for long stretches, occasionally aching in a way that felt like regression but was not. I broke a wrist once and remember the specific frustration of the middle weeks, when the cast came off and the arm looked healed and was, in every functional sense, still weak. Healed and finished are not the same word, whatever we tell each other.
I think the culture around me is mostly impatient with this. We want the testimony with the clean turning point, the year that changed everything, and I understand the appeal, I have wanted that story for myself more than once. But the actual mending, in the relationships and habits and griefs I have watched close over time, has almost never had a single turning point. It has had a thousand small returns. The same forgiveness, offered again on a Tuesday when it had seemed finished on a Sunday. The same old wound, checked on again, found a little less raw than the month before.
What has helped me most is lowering my definition of progress to match how mending actually moves. Not "am I healed" but "am I less raw than I was six months ago." That is a question I can usually answer honestly, and the answer, slowly, has mostly been yes. It is a much smaller question than the one I used to ask, and a much more truthful one.
I no longer expect the dramatic turning point, though I would not refuse one if it came. I have made peace with the longer arithmetic instead: this month a little steadier than last month, this year a little less afraid than the year before. It is not the story I would have chosen to tell. It has turned out to be the only one that is actually true, and I have come to trust it more than the version with the clean ending.