Some Wounds Never Fully Heal.

On the tenderness of being human.

Some wounds never fully heal.

How do feel when you read that?

I've seen this statement passed around by various people, people who have a pulse on what it is to be human, including myself. And I've seen people rage, argue, and disavow it. There is no right or wrong response, just...

How does it make you feel? To be wounded—permanently so perhaps?

I happen to agree that some wounds may never fully heal. Though scar tissue may form a sort of soreness may forever endure. It’s not because I want to feed into a field of "brokenness" that keeps people trapped in a "healing" cycle.

Quite the opposite.

Being wounded is being human.

Our hurts shape how move through the world as much as our gifts and they are often born from the same vulnerable place. The wound. In this there is no shame.

I have a deep (childhood) wound; and it plugs into a collective one that most, if not all of us bear: abandonment.

There are other events (like abuse) around it that make it even more tender. On the day my counselor told me that my wound might never fully heal at first I was furious, then slowly came the feeling of freedom. If my wound might never fully heal that meant I didn't have to keep fussing with it. I needed to learn to listen to it.

My great grandfather had over 60% of his body burned in a welding accident. He lost a kidney; he was covered in scars. He did all the things he wanted to do, but I imagine that pain stayed with him through his whole life. And some experiences do that to our psyche, too.

Between collective trauma and recurring trauma, you, too, may never fully heal, but you can learn tools to manage the ongoing fuckery that is life, and to regulate yourself. And those are helpful. Besides, real “healing” often comes in spite of ourselves, in spite of our efforts and on its course and timeline. It may be time itself or it may be a kind word, a song, a book, or a ray of sunshine that penetrates our scar tissue and returns the flow of blood to our soul.

More important than any healing we engage with, we can learn to live with our wounds, our, tenderness and our humanness.

So many of us spend so much time and resources trying to fix ourselves, trying to put back together what's been shattered, trying to act as if we were never hurt or wondering what our lives would be like if we were just “whole.”

For me, the inverse is true: the bigger I allow my wound to be, the less it effects me. Fussing over it, trying to fix it, trying to seal it up just didn't work, but treating it as the tender pulsing opening to my own aliveness does.

This is how I honor the hurt, the humanity, the innocence within. This is how I've become more real.

Now, how does that make you feel?