Yasemin Isler
How aging, illness, and the quiet honesty of being human reveal a different kind of healing
There are moments in life when the body speaks in ways the world has trained us not to hear. A tightness that doesn’t lift. A fatigue that outstays its welcome. An ache that feels older than our years. Illness has a way of shattering whatever illusions we cling to about control, capability, permanence. And yet, strangely, it is often in the middle of that chaos, those unwelcome sensations, that frayed patience, that vulnerability we try so hard to conceal, that something quiet and luminous begins to appear.
I’ve come to realize that in the very place I once believed healing was absent, it has been present all along.
It is not the kind of healing society teaches us to pursue with relentless determination, the one measured in lab results, treatment outcomes, or the ability to get back to who we “used to be.” The healing I’m speaking of is older than medicine and younger than breath. It is subtle, unspectacular, easily missed, and easily dismissed. It arrives with a gentleness that doesn’t shout, as a soft truth that loosens the grip of striving.
It begins when the expectations fall away.
It shows up when I no longer demand that my body perform, when I stop resisting what is already here and let go of the belief that healing must be earned through effort or improvement. It arrives when I allow myself simply to be.
In that simplicity, I realize I am healed, not cured or restored to some earlier version of myself, nor made shiny and triumphant by the standards of a culture mesmerized by youth and invincibility, but healed in a deeper, more faithful sense: returned to belonging with myself.
We live in a world that has choreographed a very specific vision of wellness. It is full of words like optimization, longevity, and anti-aging. A world that treats the natural dwindling of energy as a personal flaw. A world that suggests that being sick means we have failed at some secret test. The story of health has been narrowed into an unforgiving narrative: you must bounce back quickly, stay productive, look radiant, and never reveal the cracks.
We use phrases like “battle” and “fight,” as if the body is an enemy to conquer rather than a companion doing its best to stay here with us.
So many people, far more than we realize, carry their suffering silently. They are stoic by nature, but they have been taught that speaking of pain is a disruption to the social order. Illness is something to be concealed, managed privately, made invisible. We praise resilience but punish vulnerability. We applaud the “strong” ones who return to work before they are ready. We admire the ones who hide the tremors in their hands, the swelling in their face, the exhaustion in their bones, or myriad other things. We mistake endurance for wholeness and invisibility for strength.
What a heavy, unreasonable ask.
And still, we do it. We pull ourselves together. We straighten our posture. We smile even when it hurts. We pretend we are fine because that is what “normal” requires. We compare our bodies to the ones we once inhabited, and measure every difference as a loss. We swallow our fear that aging is a slow erasure. We bury our grief that the body we once trusted now surprises us with limits.
By the time we dare to say out loud, I am struggling, the confession feels too dramatic, too late, and too charged with shame. It becomes tangled with the belief that we should have fixed ourselves sooner, or coped better, or tried harder, or done something, anything, to outrun the body’s truth.
What if the problem has never been the illness, or the ache, or the slowness of recovery, or aging?
What if the problem is the story we were taught to tell about it?
We forget that getting older is not an error to be corrected. It is a privilege denied to many. Our bodies, imperfect as they are, work tirelessly without applause. They hold us upright in a world that never stops moving. They carry our past, our joys, our traumas, and our longings. They remember every moment we tried to forget. They have folded themselves around our lives with a loyalty we rarely recognize.
If the body falters, it is not because it has failed us. It is because it has accompanied us through everything.
There is a tenderness in that realization. A softening. A slowing down of the battle stance. A recognition that healing might not require action as much as it requires presence.
Of course, we can still seek treatment, take the medication, consult the specialist, try new therapies, follow the advice that feels right. We can do what is feasible, supportive, and aligns with our values. But the cultural script tells us to push these choices to extremes, to treat every illness like a war we must win, even when the odds are stacked impossibly against us. When we do not “succeed,” we assume it must be a personal failure rather than the natural, unpredictable unfolding of a human life.
Healing becomes a finish line rather than a relationship.
No wonder so many of us feel defeated before we even begin. No wonder we exhaust ourselves trying to be who we were twenty or thirty years ago. No wonder rest feels suspicious, indulgent, and unearned.
What if we allow ourselves to inhabit the body we have today?
What if we let our current experience, not our remembered youth, not our hoped-for future-state improvement, be enough to witness, honor, and soften into?
What if healing is not the outcome of effort, but the quiet permission to stop fleeing from ourselves?
For me, the revelation came not with a grand insight, but with surrender. With the willingness to sit in stillness while the body felt chaotic, unpredictable, and pained. With letting breath be enough. With letting space open where resistance once lived.
I realized that healing can happen in the very moment we stop insisting on change.
No expectations.
No resistance.
Letting go.
Letting be.
Simply being.
Not as a mantra, a prescription, or a way to get somewhere, but as a way of resting in the truth that nothing more is required of us in this moment.
There is liberation here. It is not the triumphant liberation sold in glossy self-help slogans, but the ancient, tender kind that comes from being fully present with what is already true.
This kind of healing flows through us naturally, like light through an open window. It does not demand that we feel better. It does not insist that we return to our former selves. It does not scold us for being human. It simply meets us where we are, without conditions.
In meeting ourselves in this way, something shifts in the quality of our relationship to the body. We stop fighting, blaming, and performing wellness. The body becomes a companion again, not a battlefield.
We understand that to be alive at all, to wake up one more morning, to stand in this aging skin, to breathe through another day, is a kind of healing in itself. We have lived long enough to become fragile, which means we have lived long enough to be here.
That is not failure.
That is grace.
So when I say we could realize we are healed, I do not mean we arrive at this realization when we are free from illness, or discomfort, or aging. I mean we are no longer exiled from ourself. We are no longer waiting to be some other version of ourself before we can belong to our own life.
Healing, in this sense, is not something we achieve. It is something we allow.
A quiet presence that meets the moment exactly as it is.
A gentle loosening of all the stories about how we should be.
A tender recognition that nothing has to be fixed for this moment to be whole.
In its simplest form, healing is the space where we can let our self exist, with all our limitations, all our imperfections, all our aging and aching and striving and stopping. It is the space where we remember that being alive, even in a body that does not always cooperate, is its own kind of liberation.
Perhaps, beneath all the expectations and judgments and comparisons, this is the healing we have been searching for all along.
If you enjoyed this piece, share it with someone who carries their suffering quietly.