You don’t have to get over it. 

God, I hate it when people say that. 

You don’t have to let it go. 

You don’t have to move on, love. 

You don’t have to forgive. 

You don’t have to bury your trauma to make other people more comfortable. 

No one else gets to say when or how you climb out and forwards and upwards on the jagged shards of something that shattered you and everything inside and around you so utterly. 

No one else gets to tell you how high those walls are. 

No one else gets to define your pain. 

You DO have to process. 

You do have to look at the pieces. And that’s often the hardest part… 

You do have to pick them up so you can clear a path to carry on, and carry them with you.

Sometimes they will be heavy. 

Sometimes you will forget you have them. 

Sometimes they will drop out of your arms or pockets, when you least expect, and they will cut you again and you will bleed - new wounds on top of old scars. 

You may use some to make something new. 

You may find you can discard others along the way. 

You may look at them one day and find that like pebbles they have been smoothed by the ride, by your own tide, and their sharp edges have somehow rounded out.

They can’t hurt you anymore. 

They are memories; they are souvenirs; they are old friends.  

You may find that they are beautiful. 

You may even start a collection, in a jar, that you get out and look at, holding their smoothness in your palm - remembering. 

And every time you visit you will see them a bit differently; you will learn something new. 

When they were a mountain, you couldn’t ‘get over them’, these stones, these rocks. 

But you DID conquer them. 

You lifted them, even when you didn’t think you could. 

You changed them, just as they changed you. 

You got through it, not over it. 

With a little help from time, and tears. The tools of erosion.