I have always wondered why people say that time heals all wounds. It sounds simple, yet it has never felt that way to me.

Scars from the past are fragile. They may look healed, hardened by time, yet they can break open again when something touches them in just the right place. The pain may grow quieter as the years pass, but the scar tissue remains tender. Sometimes it even seems to spread, covering a larger part of who we are. The hurt is still there, only dulled and distributed across a wider field.

It reminds me of what I once wrote about sadness, an inconvenient truth: something that never quite leaves.

That is why I have come to think of healing less as making the scars disappear and more as learning how to live with them. The pain is no longer as sharp, but it can still resurface at the slightest trigger: a memory, a place, a sentence, a face, or sometimes a story.

Maybe this is also why I have found myself drawn to storytelling. As I move deeper into filmmaking and writing, I keep returning to the places where memory and emotion meet. Stories have a quiet way of making us look at what we might otherwise avoid. They give shape to experiences that are difficult to explain, and sometimes they allow us to sit with a wound long enough to understand what it has become.

I’m starting to believe that time does not heal all wounds. What time gives us is something different. Distance. Perspective. A little more room to breathe.

Real healing, I’m learning, comes from engaging with our scars rather than simply waiting for them to fade. It means acknowledging what happened, understanding how it changed us, and finding a way to carry it without allowing it to define the entirety of who we are.

Some scars may never disappear. But perhaps healing is not about forgetting that they are there. Perhaps it is about reaching a point where we can touch them without bleeding.

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Originally published on September 10, 2024