I Was So Busy Healing, I Forgot to Have a Bloody Good Time

I have tried it all.

Kundalini awakening in Bali. Weekly sound healing. More yin yoga than I can count—which I’m now training to teach. Trauma release therapy. Cold plunges. Shadow work. Inner-child work. Past-life regression. Talk therapy. Reiki. Light therapy.

You name it, I have probably done it.

And I want to be clear: I’m not taking the piss out of any of it. These practices have been a huge part of my journey. Some cracked me open. Some helped me understand myself in ways I never had before. Others gave me language for pain I had been carrying silently for years. I talk about many of them in depth throughout this journal because they mattered. They still matter.

But after trying all the things and doing all the work, I had to admit something I didn’t really want to admit.

Something still wasn’t shifting.

My spark wasn’t returning. I was healing, processing, regulating, releasing and becoming increasingly self-aware—but I still felt as though I was living a life that wasn’t truly mine.

I had become very good at working on myself.

I had forgotten how to enjoy myself.

When healing becomes your whole personality

There is a strange point in the healing journey where wellbeing can become another performance. Another full-time job. Another way to measure whether you are doing life correctly.

You wake up and check your nervous system before you check whether you are actually happy. You analyse every trigger, journal every feeling and wonder whether your inability to decide what to have for lunch is an unhealed childhood wound.

Every bad day must mean something. Every uncomfortable emotion needs to be processed. Every wobble becomes evidence that there is another layer to uncover.

Before you know it, you have twelve saved podcasts about regulation, three half-finished journals, a cupboard full of supplements and a morning routine so elaborate it requires its own project manager.

I say that with love because I have been that woman.

Healing gave me tools I desperately needed. But somewhere along the way, I started treating joy as the prize I would receive once I had finally fixed every broken part of myself.

Of course, that day never came.

Because I wasn’t a broken iPhone waiting for the right spiritual practice to repair me. I was a human being who needed to stop postponing her life and start fucking living it.

When I asked myself when I had last felt truly alive, my mind didn’t go to a retreat, a treatment or some huge spiritual breakthrough.

It went back to the girl I used to be.

I’m a 90s kid. Music, partying and being completely reckless were part of my DNA. Before joy became something to document, improve or squeeze into a morning routine, it was simply how we lived.

It was getting on your bike and cycling around until you found your friends because there was no group chat and definitely no Find My Friends. You knocked on doors, followed the sound of shouting and stayed outside until somebody’s mum called everyone in for tea. We climbed trees, grazed our knees, made up ridiculous games and came home absolutely feral. We may not have had much, but we had freedom—and we didn’t even know it.

Sometimes joy was a Friday night in Blockbuster, spending longer choosing the video than actually watching it. But once you chose, you committed. There was no scrolling through another 6,000 options while half-watching and checking your phone. There was just the film, the snacks and whoever was squeezed onto the sofa beside you.

As we got older, that freedom got louder. It looked like a glitter top and trouser skirt from Tammy Girl, eyebrows tweezed within an inch of their lives and enough Impulse body spray to fumigate the bedroom. We went out with a Nokia 3310, 10p of credit and no real plan. Somehow, we always found one another.

We could spend the afternoon singing into hairbrushes to the Spice Girls, then wander the streets looking for our friends and end up drinking warm Lambrini in the park. Later, we would go home, listen to the dial-up internet scream and create an MSN name full of cryptic song lyrics and passive-aggressive punctuation aimed at exactly one person. We took our Myspace Top Eight incredibly seriously, but almost nothing else.

We definitely didn’t build an identity around having the “right” taste in music. One minute we were belting out NSYNC, the next we were moshing to Slipknot, screaming along to Marilyn Manson’s version of “Tainted Love” or losing our minds to “Born Slippy.”

Before streaming, we would sit beside the radio with a finger hovering over the record button, desperate to catch our favourite song and silently begging the presenter not to talk over the intro. Later, our mix CDs made no sense because neither did we. Half the songs came from LimeWire, so getting one to play at all felt like a victory. Nothing was instantly available, which somehow made every small thing feel like an event.

And when we finally made it to festivals, we didn’t watch them through a screen. We danced. Badly. Sweating, filthy, with our hair stuck to our faces and completely inside the moment. The only evidence might be a terrible disposable-camera photo that appeared weeks later, taken from an angle no human face has ever survived.

I’m not pretending everything was perfect back then. It wasn’t. I’m saying we knew how to disappear into a moment without asking what it meant, how it looked or whether it was good for us.

That was the part of me I had lost: the girl who danced because a song came on, not because ecstatic dance was scheduled for Thursday at seven. The girl who laughed with her friends until her stomach hurt, ate what she wanted without turning it into a moral decision, cried at chick flicks and slapped on glitter for a Friday night without wondering whether any of it was helping her become her “highest self.”

She wasn’t healed. She wasn’t optimised. She had no five-step morning routine and had never heard the phrase “cortisol face.”

But fuck, she knew how to be alive.

I think many of us have lost that part of ourselves—not only because we grew up, but because adulthood became one long exercise in self-monitoring.

We track our sleep, steps, calories, moods, cycles, screen time and productivity. We photograph a beautiful meal before tasting it. We record a concert while watching it through a six-inch screen. We turn hobbies into side hustles and quiet moments into opportunities to consume more advice.

No wonder joy feels so far away. We’re barely inside our own lives while they are happening.

My new healing practice is having a bloody good time

For the last six months, I have focused on something much less glamorous and, honestly, far more transformative.

I have focused on enjoying my life.

Not the imaginary future version where I have healed every wound and reached every goal. This life. The ordinary one. The one happening now.

I have been finding joy in the mundane: dancing around my living room to club classics without a care in the world, cooking dinner while 90s hip-hop blasts through the kitchen, and dressing up purely for myself without giving a shit whether anyone else thinks it is too much.

I have run around naked in nature because why the fuck not? I have tucked into a pot of Häagen-Dazs while crying at The Notebook. I have laughed loudly, stayed up talking, worn glitter on completely inappropriate days and let myself be silly.

Sometimes the moment needs no analysis. Sometimes you need to put on “Rhythm Is a Dancer,” shut the living-room curtains and behave as though you are at a school disco after three Panda Pops.

Sometimes healing looks like therapy, breathwork and facing the parts of yourself you have avoided for years.

And sometimes it looks like eating beige food, watching Clueless for the fiftieth time and quoting every line even though nobody asked.

Maybe finding joy again is less about changing my life and more about finally noticing it. I have the most incredible group of girlfriends, a fantastic job, my independence and the freedom to be completely myself. No one is watching my every move or making me question my own choices anymore. My life isn’t perfect, but it is mine—and I have fallen in love with the simple, ordinary pleasure of actually living it.