How do I know if I'm healing from a toxic relationship or just numb?

There's a real difference, and Mirabai understood this in her own way—she didn't confuse the absence of pain with the presence of love. Numbness is stillness without aliveness. You move through your day, but nothing touches you. Healing, by contrast, is when feeling returns in layers. Some days you notice what hurt, and it sits with you without overwhelming. Other days you laugh at something small and it actually reaches you. A useful marker: in numbness, your chest stays locked. In healing, your chest unlocks gradually—grief comes, yes, but so does curiosity about who you are now. You start noticing what you actually want again, not what you've been trained to accept. Your body begins to matter to you. You make choices because they're yours, not because you're running from pain. Toxic relationships teach us to abandon ourselves as a survival strategy. Healing isn't about forgetting what happened—it's about reclaiming the parts of yourself that got small. Start by noticing: what did you stop doing? What did you stop wanting? Those small things—a hobby, a friendship, a quiet morning—they're breadcrumbs back to yourself. Follow them.