October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

There was a time when I thought surviving something meant eventually being able to leave it behind.

To stop thinking about it.

To stop feeling it.

To become enough of who I was before that I could finally say it was over.

But I don’t think healing has worked that way for me.

Some things change you.

They change what you notice.

The quietness in someone’s voice.

Fear hiding beneath an ordinary sentence.

The complicated reasons someone might stay, leave and return, or struggle to explain something they don’t completely understand themselves.

You begin to recognize things other people might miss.

Because once, you lived them.

I would never call what happened to me a gift.

And I would never tell someone to be grateful for the thing that hurt them.

But I do believe God can take what was meant to diminish us and refuse to let it be wasted.

Maybe that’s part of what Galatians means when it tells us to bear one another’s burdens.

Sometimes we can carry a corner of someone else’s pain because we remember exactly how heavy it was when we carried our own.

And maybe that’s one of the quiet ways healing begins to reach beyond us.

Not because the pain was necessary.

Not because it was good.

But because after everything it took from us…

it doesn’t get to decide what we do with what remains.

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“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
— Galatians 6:2