You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be. Unless. Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others. Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful. I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany. He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived. I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?” He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”
