When Healing Brings Old Wounds to the Surface

I’ve been quieter than usual lately, and not because I don’t have anything to say — but because finding the words has felt harder than usual.

The side effects from Mounjaro have hit me far more intensely than I ever expected. Combined with living with Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension (IIH) and chronic migraines, my body has felt like it’s constantly under siege. The nausea, the fatigue, the pressure in my head, the pain that seeps into every thought — it’s exhausting in ways that are difficult to explain unless you live inside a body that doesn’t give you peace.

Recently, it became too much. My IIH and migraine flare-ups escalated to the point where I spent several days in hospital. Those days were some of the darkest I’ve faced in a long time. Pain has a way of shrinking your world, of trapping you inside your own head, and there were moments where everything felt unbearingly heavy. Not just physically, but emotionally too. When pain becomes relentless, it can pull you into places you don’t recognise — places that feel frightening and isolating.

And when your body is vulnerable, your mind often follows.

The Weight of Memory

What I didn’t anticipate was how much this period would drag old memories back to the surface.

Weight loss, illness, and medication have a way of reopening doors you thought were firmly shut. Suddenly, I wasn’t just dealing with side effects and flare-ups — I was confronting decades of emotional baggage around my weight.

Some of the most painful memories involve my grandmother. As a child and young adult, I was teased and criticised about my size in ways that left lasting scars. Words said casually, even cruelly, stay with you. Being told that men only sleep with fat women because they think fat women are desperate is not something you ever truly forget. Those comments seep into your sense of worth, your relationships, your self-image. They shape how you see yourself long after the person who said them is gone.

Even now, years later, those voices can still rise up in moments of weakness — whispering doubt, shame, and old lies I’ve worked so hard to unlearn.

Emotional Eating as Survival

For a long time, food wasn’t just food. It was comfort. It was distraction. It was a way to soothe feelings I didn’t know how to sit with. Emotional eating became a coping mechanism — a way to survive hurt, rejection, anxiety, and pain.

I don’t say that with shame anymore. It kept me going when I didn’t have better tools. But unlearning it has been one of the hardest parts of this journey.

Breaking patterns that were built over years — even decades — isn’t just about willpower. It’s about rewiring your response to emotion. It’s about learning to feel without immediately trying to numb. And some days, especially when pain flares and medication side effects hit hard, that emotional pull feels stronger than ever.

Yet despite everything, I’ve lost five stone so far.

That number represents far more than weight. It represents resilience. It represents confronting trauma instead of burying it. It represents choosing to keep going even when my body and mind are screaming for relief.

When Progress Doesn’t Feel Like Progress

What people don’t talk about enough is how progress can feel uncomfortable. How healing can hurt. How change can bring grief alongside pride.

There are days when I don’t feel victorious. Days when my body feels foreign. Days when old habits call to me because they feel familiar and safe. Days when illness overshadows achievement, and it’s hard to remember how far I’ve come.

Being hospitalised reminded me just how fragile things can feel. How quickly your focus shifts from goals and plans to simply getting through the next hour. It humbled me in ways I didn’t expect.

But it also reminded me that I am still here.

Looking Forward, Gently

Right now, I’m doing my best to focus on moving forward — gently, imperfectly, honestly. I’m learning to listen to my body instead of fighting it. To respect my limits. To acknowledge my pain without letting it define me.

This journey isn’t linear. It’s messy and complicated and deeply personal. It involves grief for the past, fear for the future, and hope that sometimes feels fragile but refuses to disappear.

I am not healed. I am not finished. But I am trying.

Trying to break cycles.
Trying to build healthier patterns.
Trying to be kinder to myself than the voices of the past ever were.

And for now, that is enough.