Laughter as Medicine
There were stretches of my healing where laughter felt impossible.
Not unlikely. Not distant. Impossible.
When your nervous system is wrecked, when your body is living like the danger is still happening, laughter can feel like it belongs to some other version of life. Some other woman. Someone lighter. Someone not carrying the pain of what you are carrying.
That was me for a while.
And then, little by little, laughter started coming back.
Not because everything was okay. Not because the pain was gone. Not because I had wrapped the whole thing up in some neat little lesson and moved on. It came back while I was still in it. While I was still hurting. While I was still trying to find my footing again.
That matters.
Because laughter is not denial, and it’s not pretending. It is not minimizing what happened.
Sometimes laughter is medicine because it interrupts the grip of pain for just a moment. Sometimes it is the body remembering there is still life here. Still light. Still something in you that has not been taken.
I think laughter can be one of the first signs that the soul is breathing again.
That may sound dramatic, but it’s real.
There’s something deeply healing
about laughing so hard you forget your pain for a second. About catching yourself genuinely amused when you thought you had lost all access to joy. About realizing your body is doing something other than bracing or writhing in pain.
It softens something, opens a window.
It reminds you that healing is not only crying on the floor, shaking, grieving, raging, understanding trauma, and piecing yourself back together. It’s also letting yourself have the moments that feel good. The absurd moments. The ridiculous moments. The moments where you laugh at something stupid and feel, for one second, like a ‘normal’ human again.
That’s not small. That’s part of the healing.
For me, laughter has been one of the ways life came back online that I could recognize.
It did not fix everything. It did not erase anything. But it brought breath into places in me that had gone tight and dark and silent for too long.
Sometimes healing looks holy and profound.
Sometimes it looks like laughing so hard at yourself in the front seat of your rig that tears run down your face.
Both count.
Especially that one.