Healing is messy and complicated, and like everything else in life that is messy and complicated, we try to fast forward to the good parts.

We so desperately want to feel normal again that we try to bypass the discomfort, and we patiently wait for our lives to go back to normal.

The truth is there are some wounds we may never heal from. There are some pains and traumas that will stay with us for our whole lives. Popping up just when we were convinced we were free from it. We can’t pray them, drink them, or journal them away. They have unpacked themselves in the deepest recesses of our psyche and have altered who we thought we were.

Just like a broken bone that will never be quite right again, our brains do the best they can to compensate and allow us to function again, but it will always ache when the rain is coming.

So many of us decide that this is where we will remain. We allow this wound to control us. We can’t form relationships, or hold jobs, or parent our children because we are living in our pain. We feel justified in staying here. After all, our wound was not our fault. Why should we have to keep going when the pain seems to be unbearable.

We have to keep going because we are humans. None of us are free from these wounds. No one is immune from trauma and pain. If we allow ourselves to sit here, in this space of pain, our wound can’t begin to heal. It will bleed into every choice we make. Every part of our lives will be tainted by that wound.

We owe it to ourselves to acknowledge the pain, find something to help us manage it for a while, and then trust we have recovered sufficiently to carry on with our lives. But that takes time and patience. It’s not an overnight process. There will be days where things feel much better, and days when we feel like we’ve regressed. Because that is how the body heals.

There is always another level, and, inevitably, scar tissue will remain. We can look at that scar with anger and hatred, or we can look at the beauty of the pain that helped form us into the people we are today. The scar will remain regardless of the choice we make.

And even though some of our wounds have been inflicted by others, we are the ones responsible for our healing. It may be done with a team of people, but at the end of the day, we get to make the choice to sit in our own pain or move forward.

Healing is hard. It takes time and energy, and it forces us to accept the parts of ourselves that will never be the same. But letting our wound stay open is harder.

Don’t allow yourself to miss out on a beautiful life because you are waiting for healing.

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