This Ain’t Healing

Some wounds don’t heal. They’re meant to be carried.

You don’t walk away from a sword fight unmarked. Today’s dialog and social language around healing has sanded down the truth; made trauma palatable and in an odd way almost even desirable, as a way of saying “I belong too”. But the truth is sharper. What happened to you is in the past — you can’t change it, can’t erase an experience. You integrate it. You carry it, and if you’re lucky, it gets woven into your posture… your humor… your discernment… your love, what you can give others. My intent is not to belittle anyone else’s process, or what makes them feel good, or smile, or just take a break for a while. That’s all truly valid and, to an extent, useful. But what we most often call “healing” is in the long run just hiding; and either way it misses the gold — growth.

It doesn’t mean you glow; it means you build the strength to hold what you couldn’t before. You don’t become better; you carry better. You don’t become light. You become real.

There’s a character in myths that rarely gets airtime: the wounded one who keeps going. No redemption arc. No mountaintop finale. Just a quiet forward motion. Scar tissue turned to spine. A kind of wisdom that doesn’t show up in a TED talk — but in how someone listens. In what they don’t need to say. Pain metabolized into perception. It humbles them just enough to be of real service in the real world, and in the Hero’s Journey, the central character always earns one. Think Luke Skywalker and his missing hand, or Sir Lancelot and his crippled leg.

You can see it when someone walks into a room. There’s a presence to those who’ve owned their wounds. A gravity. They don’t rush to offer advice or talk about their trauma. It’s more that they know something now. Something they can’t — and wouldn’t — put into words quickly. It’s better to earn the capacity for empathy than for knowledge, or, even honor.

In Narrative Therapy, clinical professionals call this “reauthoring the story” — shifting the meaning of pain rather than erasing it. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), it’s about expanding “psychological flexibility”: choosing values-aligned action even in the presence of distress. Different names, same arc. The wound doesn’t vanish. You just stop needing it to.

That’s the work I care about. Not healing. Becoming.