Wound

The injury that did not heal cleanly and that you have been working around ever since.

What was done to you early enough that it became part of how you understood the world to work.

The betrayal that changed your ability to trust in a particular way.

A loss that you never fully processed because at the time you could not afford to.

The thing that still hurts when you press on it, even now.

What repeated exposure to a particular kind of treatment taught you to expect.

The wound that was inflicted not with malice but with carelessness, and the carelessness that made it worse.

An accumulation of small wounds that only became visible once the accumulation was complete.

What the absence of something necessary — safety, recognition, love — left in its place.

A humiliation that marked you more deeply than anyone watching could have understood.

The relationship that was formative in the wrong direction.

What you learned to do with pain so it would not show.

The version of yourself that was damaged in the formation.

An injury to your sense of what you were worth that took decades to repair.

What you have been protecting against, at some cost, for most of your life.

A wound passed down — not genetic but behavioral, a shape of suffering transmitted across generations.

What you now recognize as the source of something you thought was simply your character.

The moment when you were not believed or not protected, and what that taught you.

The injury that keeps signaling, even when you would rather it was quiet.

What you have been healing, still, and the slow evidence that it is possible.