When Wounds Begin to Speak

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When Wounds Begin to Speak

The Grace of Separating the Stones

Perhaps I am difficult to love.

Perhaps I am too much.

Maybe I am not enough.

Perhaps people eventually leave.

There are women who have carried these thoughts for so many years that they no longer recognize

them as thoughts.

They feel like truth.

And that may be one of the most painful things we can come to believe about ourselves.

Not simply that someone hurt us.

Not simply that something we hoped for never came to be.

But that somewhere inside what happened, there must have been something wrong with us.

Something we failed to be. Something we should have known. Something we could have done

differently.

And so we begin looking at ourselves through the eyes of people who may never have truly seen

us.

When Separate Stories Become One Story

The human heart longs to understand.

When painful experiences begin gathering across the years, the heart may quietly begin asking,

“What do all of these have in common?”

We are meaning-makers. We look for patterns because patterns help us make sense of what we

have lived through.

But sometimes, in searching for meaning, we begin finding ourselves at the center of every painful

story.

Not, “That relationship hurt.”

Not, “That dream never came to life.”

But quietly, “Perhaps this is what happens to me.”

One disappointment slowly borrows the voice of another. The wounds begin speaking together.

The Grace of Separating the Stones

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And before we know it, the question is no longer what happened. It is who we believe ourselves to

be because it happened.

These wounds are not simply memories of painful experiences anymore. They are interpretations

that may have become attached to our sense of self.

The Weight of an Invisible Bundle

Those interpretations can begin to carry a weight of their own, like stones gathered in an invisible

bundle.

No one else can see them. Yet a woman may feel their weight every day.

She carries them into new relationships, into conversations where she worries she has said too

much, and into the silence afterward when she wonders whether she matters.

Eventually, she forgets she is carrying the bundle. She simply believes the heaviness is who she is.

And sometimes, that becomes the deepest wound of all.

Not what someone did.

Not what someone failed to give.

But what she came to believe about herself while trying to survive it.

The Gentle Work of Separating the Stones

What if some of the things you have believed about yourself were never yours to carry?

What if being left did not mean you were unworthy of staying for?

What if something you worked so hard to build did not succeed, but that never diminished what

you were capable of becoming?

The sorrow was real.

The disappointment was real.

The loss was real.

None of it needs to be made smaller.

But what happened and what we came to believe about ourselves are not necessarily the same

thing.

Pain deserves to be heard. But it does not always tell the whole story.

She opens the invisible bundle and begins lifting out the stones.

I am setting down the doubt that made me believe I was less capable than I am.

You left, but that did not define me.

I release the weight of your silence that made me feel invisible.

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One by one, she sets them down.

The sorrow remains, but her heart begins to feel lighter.

The Woman Beneath the Pile

Long before anyone misunderstood you…

Long before anyone walked away…

Long before a dream fell apart…

There was already a woman worthy of love.

She does not become less beautiful because someone fails to see her.

She does not become less whole because another person's wounds touch her own.

And if you have spent years believing otherwise, these may be the words your heart has been

waiting so long to hear.

You may have drifted away from what it feels like to belong to yourself without first having to

prove that you deserve to.

You do not have to uncover that woman all at once.

She is still there. Patiently waiting beneath every story that tried to define her.

And beneath those stories lives something untouched.

No disappointment, no rejection, no silence, and no loss has ever possessed the authority to tell her

who she is.

Love has never forgotten her name.

And perhaps, in the quiet of finding herself again, she begins to say:

“I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come and find you.”

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