The Past You Cannot Edit

There is a chapter in your life that you have been revisiting. Not because it teaches you something new each time. Because the ending has not yet resolved in your body the way it has in your mind.

I am not asking you to forgive what should not have happened, or to be grateful for what did not serve you, or to perform peace about something that was genuinely wrong.

I am asking you to close the chapter. Not by rewriting it. By acknowledging that what happened, happened, and that the happened-ness of it is not the same thing as your obligation to keep returning to it for the rest of your life.

You are allowed to close it. You are allowed to carry forward only what serves you from what it taught you, and to leave the wound on the page, which is where wounds belong, rather than in your body, which is where they currently reside.

The next chapter is waiting. It cannot begin while the last one is still open.

— Job