Eliminating Wounds *

I met a friend after a long absence. I knew that the past few years had not been easy for her and that she had endured harsh events and enough disappointments to lose her trust in people, yet she did not.

Instead, I found the friend I had known long ago: the same laughter, the same warmth, and a remarkable ability to embrace life as if it had never betrayed her.

I left the meeting thinking: How do some people go through all this without becoming copies of those who hurt them?

I did not find the answer in kindness alone. Kindness before pain may be mere temperament, but remaining kind after pain is a great victory of the soul. How can one swallow the bitterness of life and then refuse to learn bitterness from it?

When someone lets you down, you must choose: either understand that trust is built on experiences and takes time, and take that as a lesson; or become suspicious of every new person until they prove otherwise, which is a wound that still bleeds.

When you are generous and give someone more than they deserve, you must choose: either realize that generosity does not mean forgetting yourself, and take that as a lesson; or enter every new relationship calculating every word and action, fearing being the one who gave too much. That is a relationship that has ended, with its wounds still open.

When we carry scars into our subsequent relationships, we think we have left their authors in the past, yet their impact remains. Their presence lingers in our choices: we doubt because of them, we retreat because of them, and we close doors to everyone out of fear of pain. Those who come later pay the price for wounds they did not help create.

The point is not to emerge from experiences exactly as we entered them. Life teaches us much, and it is natural to learn, to become more cautious, to give our trust consciously, and to close doors we know lead only to harm. But there is a difference between caution that protects us and fear that deprives us of everything that could be beautiful. Thus, the question is not: What has changed in us? The question is: Did the experience make us more aware, or more hardened?

Not everyone who becomes cold has grown strong, nor has everyone who stops complaining reached clarity. Indifference is sometimes not the end of feeling, but a less painful way to hide.

Healing does not mean forgetting. It means remembering without letting the past steer our lives, and learning from it without handing over the keys to our coming days.

This is why I admire those who have grown older without their souls aging. They are not naive, and life has never been light for them. Rather, they have realized that survival does not mean emerging from pain unscathed, but emerging from it without becoming its extension.

Here, I understood what remained in my friend despite everything she had been through. She kept the lesson and left the cruelty with those who inflicted it. She refused to grant those who hurt her one final privilege: the right to decide who she would become afterward. Some people pass through our lives to leave us a lesson, and the height of wisdom is to keep the lesson and not allow them to take anything of us with them.