Wounding as Becoming

We are taught to seek healing as if it is an erasure. That once we "get better," the pain vanishes and the person we were before returns, whole and untouched. But I have never returned to anything. Only continued.

Pain does not politely excuse itself when it's done with you. It lingers like smoke in the walls, reshaping the air you breathe. To heal, in the way most understand it, is to forget the fire. But what if you needed the fire? What if the pain was not a detour, but the road?

I have grown not from resolution, but rupture. My becoming came through bloodied thresholds—through nights where sleep was a mercy I was denied, through mornings that greeted me with grief curled on my chest like a feral cat. I did not become wiser because I learned to numb it. I became wiser because I stayed awake through the storm, soaked and shivering, refusing to close my eyes.

The world rewards polished survival. The tidy narrative. “I went through something hard, but I’m okay now.” But that kind of "okay" is often a shallow grave. Real growth is not antiseptic. It is the slow stitching of flesh you had to rip open yourself because no one else would do it. It is learning to walk differently because a bone never set right—but learning to walk anyway.

Scars are not blemishes. They are hieroglyphs. They are the carved record of your endurance. Every scar is a sentence written by time onto your skin, saying: You were broken here—and you did not die.

There is a strange beauty in the jagged. A crooked kind of grace. I am not the smooth stone I once tried to be. I am all edge now. All fault line. I have become a geography of what I survived.

So no, I do not aspire to be “healed” if it means forgetting what shaped me. I want to remember. I want my pain to be a monument, not a secret. I want to carry my wounds like stained glass—fractured, but illuminated from within.

Because this is how I know I am still becoming:

I no longer flinch at the scar.

I trace it.

I name it.

And I thank it.