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From “clean girls” with their glazed skin and cucumber water to fitness influencers doing ice baths in pastel sets, the internet is flooded with soft visuals of recovery. We’re in the era of the healing arc, a term that once implied deep, personal change and now feels like it needs an aesthetic and a caption.
In truth, healing is rarely straightforward. It’s messy, nonlinear, and deeply individual. Constant exposure to idealized portrayals of growth can lead people to compare their own journeys and feel inadequate or pressured to "perform" wellness. As a result, many begin to engage in trends not because they feel meaningful, but because they are widely shared or socially rewarded—a phenomenon often referred to as performative healing, says Dr. Tanushri Talekar
Clinical Psychologist & Psychotherapist.
The Truth Behind The Visuals
We’ve all seen the videos: montages of morning matcha, therapy takeaways turned into carousel posts, softly lit routines with lo-fi music and a voiceover whispering about boundaries. These visuals are calming. Aspirational. But they also quietly imply that healing should look a certain way, serene, productive, beautiful. We have made the process of healing into something trending on timelines.
In reality, healing can be chaotic. Sometimes it’s crying in the bathroom at 2 am. Sometimes it’s skipping journaling for the third day in a row because your brain simply can’t. Sometimes it’s taking two steps forward and ten back, and then pretending like you’re fine because everyone else seems to have it figured out. The curated image of “getting better” can make the messiness of real growth feel like failure.
Healing Has Become Performative
Wellness used to be about health. Now, it’s content.
We're not just healing. We're documenting our healing. Turning vulnerability into engagement. Sharing trauma like it’s a milestone, complete with filters and captions about “choosing peace.”
And while there’s nothing wrong with talking about growth, there’s a fine line between expressing your journey and feeling like you have to package it perfectly. The pressure to always be improving, always working on yourself, always becoming “that girl”, can start to feel exhausting. Because what if you’re not there yet? What if you’re in the ugly middle, and there’s no tidy reel to go with it?
Growth isn’t a checklist. Healing isn’t a 30-day challenge. And yet, we treat it like one, with morning routines, vision boards, and quotes that try to tidy up grief, heartbreak, or burnout in a neat little arc. But people don’t grow in a straight line.
Sometimes you relapse. Sometimes you ghost your friends. Sometimes you don’t want to “do the work”. And that doesn’t make you weak or behind. It makes you human.
There’s an emotional violence in pretending that recovery is aesthetic. It invalidates the rough parts. The in-betweens. The relapses. And that’s where most of us actually live.
Growth Can Look Different
Sometimes growth means finally cleaning your room. Other times, it’s just replying to a message. Sometimes it’s showing up for therapy. Other times, it’s cancelling plans to lie in bed and cry. Healing is messy. It doesn’t always look soft. And it doesn’t have to be shared to be valid.
We need to stop managing our emotions like spreadsheets and start listening to them with patience and curiosity
So no, you don’t need a healing arc to be worthy. You don’t need a five-step glow-up plan to be growing. And you definitely don’t need to look like a Pinterest board to be doing okay.
Maybe Peace Isn’t To Chase
There’s nothing inherently wrong with romanticising a healing journey. Finding comfort in rituals, routines, and soft aesthetics can offer moments of calm in the chaos. But when the pursuit of peace becomes constant, when every emotion must be curated, optimised or shared, it stops feeling like healing and starts to feel like pressure in disguise.
"You cannot be behind in your own becoming. Every person on the planet has a unique load-bearing capacity and each defines what a load means in deeply individual ways. Some wounds will take months to mend, while others may take decades. And some fractures you’ll carry with quiet dignity not because they fully healed, but because they taught you how to live without certainty. Feeling “behind” implies there was a destination you were supposed to reach by now. But healing isn’t a race," says Dr Aman Bhonsle, Ph.D. (relationship counsellor, mindset coach and psychotherapist).
For a generation told to “do the work”, to unlearn toxic patterns, to practise mindfulness while navigating burnout, heartbreak, and hustle culture, the weight of always having to be self-aware about you, your mental health can feel overwhelming. Because the truth is, healing doesn’t always resemble progress. Sometimes, it’s simply sitting with discomfort. Not fixing it. Not reframing it. Just letting yourself feel.
Real recovery isn't always beautiful or linear. It doesn’t come with glow-ups, mood boards or perfectly lit mornings. And it certainly isn’t something you can fall behind on.
So if you’re tired, let yourself rest. If you’re still figuring it out, that’s not failure — it’s being human. Peace was never meant to be a goal to chase, but rather a space you return to. And on some days, showing up is more than enough.