Being Functional vs. Well

Posted by Alina Liao on

Last week, I had the joy and honor of providing a journaling workshop at a beautiful, inspiring Leadership & Wellness Retreat hosted by Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics (LEAP) for 40+ Asian and Pacific Islander women leaders. It was a dedicated space to use guided journaling pause, slow down, and process anything we needed to process from the past few years, from the pandemic to the rise in anti-Asian hate to personal challenges and traumas we've been carrying.

One thing that came from the workshop was the power of guided journaling to truly go deep and process what we haven't been able to process. Journaling to go deep to process things we didn't even realize we so needed to process.

Life can get like this - we know what we have to do. We meet our obligations. We achieve our goals. Things happen, including terrible things. Painful things. Trauma, loss, heartbreak. We cope. We power through. We keep going.

It's a tremendous feat, to keep going while carrying the weight of all we're carrying. Yes, you deserve to be applauded for your strength. You also deserve a break. You deserve to offload some of that weight.

My healing journey with guided journaling over the past few years has revealed to me the important difference between coping and healing - the difference between being functional and being well

Looking back, a lot of us have been functional, even at high levels. 

But we deserve more than to be functional. We deserve to be healthy. Happy. We deserve to live for ourselves and those we love, with joy, with peace, for love, with love.
 
Guided journaling and writing out the things you've been carrying, the things you've been struggling with, the pain you've been holding, is part of healing. The journaling is part of offloading some of the weight. Journaling is a way to be compassionate towards yourself - to acknowledge your pain and tend to yourself with love and tenderness. As an old therapist said to me, "At the surface we have anger. Beneath that anger is hurt. When we process our anger, we get to the hurt. Then when we process the hurt, we get to what's beneath the hurt - love."

As we go into the weekend, I hope you keep in mind that you are worthy of taking time for yourself, your body, your spirit, your healing. 

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