Healing Isn’t A Straight Road

There’s no single path for living with chronic and complex health conditions whether they come from childhood and narcissistic abuse trauma, or from autoimmune and neurodegenerative disease.

Healing isn’t a straight road. It’s a gradual walk along long and winding ways, where each bend reveals only a little more of what lies ahead.

I think that’s why I feel so deeply blessed to have regained my passion for drawing and painting. When I pick up a pencil, pastel, or paintbrush, I can create a landscape that reflects not just a place, but a journey ~ one that keeps me going. It feels like breath moving across paper or canvas, trusting that even when the road seems endless, I am still on it.

In this season, I find myself drawn again and again to paint long stretches of countryside ~ especially the red dirt roads. They call to my storytelling heart, reminding me that every journey is both enduring and belonging.

In the context of my continued healing from complex trauma, narcissistic abuse, and chronic illness, it makes perfect sense. Through creating these visual landscapes, I am reimagining a safe way forward ~ a path my body and mind can travel when words fall short.

Perhaps that’s what healing really is: a return to the road, one artful stroke at a time.

Perhaps that’s the quiet truth I’m learning as I walk and paint and breathe through the layers of healing ~ that even these long, winding roads are held within God’s tender design. The lines that once felt broken or uncertain are slowly being redrawn into something whole.

When I paint those long red roads stretching into the horizon, I see now that they are also the lines fallen for me in pleasant places ~ not always easy, not always smooth, but still belonging to a goodly heritage.

Maybe healing isn’t about finding the straightest path after all. Maybe it’s about trusting that the One who marks the lines also walks beside us, brush in hand, tracing beauty through the dust.

Quiet Prompts for the Reader

• As you consider your own journey, where do you sense the “lines” of your life being redrawn in gentler ways?

• What image, colour, or landscape feels like your own healing road today?

• How might you create something ~ a sketch, a few lines in a journal, a whispered prayer ~ to mark the ground you’ve already walked?

• What would it mean to believe, even for a moment, that your lines, too, have fallen in pleasant places?

If you take the time with these prompts, and you feel like sharing them with me ~ please do so in the comments below.

Thank you for being here on this journal page with me.

xox