Let It Hurt, Let It Heal

On giving yourself permission to fall apart — and the quiet strength of feeling it all

One day I found myself on the floor in my closet with a box of tissues next to me and my phone nearby for sad music to match my mood. I didn’t run in there with tears streaming down my face as has happened before—this time, I planned it. I had grabbed those things I thought I might have needed and went to the only place that’s ever felt safe enough for me to fall apart.

For a long time now, my closet has been my sanctuary and my time there is sacred. It’s where I go when I need to turn inward and when the noise of the outside world makes it hard to hear what’s going on inside me. Sometimes, I’m in there cross-legged in silence or listening to music, sometimes I’m journaling and other times I’m in there puffy-eyed feeling everything, all at once. Though the puffy-eyed closet days don’t happen very often anymore, every time I end up in there, I learn the same lesson over and over again: we need to let things hurt to heal.

Image from Freepik

I’d spent weeks preceding that day keeping busy—ticking off tasks each day, celebrating birthdays, and hosting friends from overseas. But those entire few weeks I was carrying around a quiet ache, a subtle but deep needling that something was off. It’s the kind of feeling that hums beneath the surface until you either face it or fall apart.

You see, before I was busy, I had found out some really painful news, and like most of my life, I pushed it away and didn’t really want to deal. After all, I had more pressing and productive things I could do with my time. I had hobbies to pursue, friends to see, and work to do. So I kept going, ignored my feelings and powered on.

Until I couldn’t.

The more I tried to carry on, the more hollow I felt. On the outside, I was functioning well, but behind the smiles and laughter, I was numb. With each passing day, the quiet ache became a weight, then an undeniable pull: go feel this.

In today’s world that glorifies hustle culture and places so much value on where we’re going, what we’re doing, and how we’re performing, there is little room left for introspection and imperfection. I often find myself feeling guilty for letting myself experience the so-called ‘negative’ emotions, preferring to shove them aside in hopes they’d quietly disappear. But my trip to the closet that day reminded me of a deeper truth:

When we resist our pain, we also resist our healing.

Despite spending weeks engaging in things that should have brought me joy or fulfillment, I felt disconnected. Denying my ‘bad’ emotions meant I was denying the good ones too. When we don’t allow sadness, grief, or anger, we also block joy, purpose, and belonging.

We can’t selectively numb.

Tuning in to the more messy parts of ourselves lets us experience the whole gamut of human emotion, and this is essential not only for our personal growth, self-discovery, and healing, but to live a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Unfortunately, our society makes it dangerously easy to avoid discomfort. We stay busy, we intellectualize, reach for booze, sex, food, endless scrolling—anything that can distract us from the ache.

But pain doesn’t go away just because we ignore it.

It waits.

It lingers.

And eventually, it demands to be felt.

Avoiding doesn’t make you strong.

Falling apart, ugly crying and getting back up—that’s strength.

The harsh truth is that we can’t avoid life’s cruel certainties—rejections, illness, death, injury to name a few. Many of us also carry old wounds that remain unprocessed, trapped below the surface and silently shaping our lives. We see this in avoidance, in our relationships, in the chronic tensions and pains held in our bodies. Disallowing ourselves to feel keeps us prisoner to the unconscious thoughts and feelings that are very much still there affecting our present lives.

This isn’t to say we should allow ourselves to stay in sadness and let it overcome us entirely. But we do need to allow space to feel our feelings as they rise and fall. To grieve. To rage. To cry. Because until we do, that pain will quietly govern us from the background. No matter how long we stall, it waits for us. It builds inside us until something cracks—or we finally open the door and let it in. That day in my closet, I didn’t collapse.

I surrendered.

I let myself grieve, and for once, I didn’t apologise for it.

Feeling doesn’t make us weak. Staying soft in a hard world is a triumphant return to the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to bury. So, let us listen to what our emotions are telling us. Sadness reminds us of what matters to us and brings our attention to what we have lost and need to grieve. Anger tells us our boundaries have been violated. Guilt tells us we have gone against our morals and values. And joy—joy tells us we’re connected to something meaningful. The list goes on and on, but whatever it is, we just need to stop resisting.

So… let it hurt, let it heal.

What if the thing we’re most afraid to feel… is the thing that sets us free?

Lots of love,
A

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“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will continue to direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

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