Inside the Boundaries I Have

Have you grieved the pure distance described in books and recovery memoirs because your life cannot give you that shape? If your life requires some ongoing contact with what has hurt you, you may feel a particular kind of sorrow. You are still tied to logistics, to schedules, to the small everyday matters of a shared past. Healing seems to belong to other people whose situations are simpler.

Hear this: your healing is yours too. Healing is not measured by how much distance you can put between yourself and what hurt you. It is measured by how much of yourself you are able to come home to, inside the life you actually have.

The mother who must coordinate a child's school pickup is still healing. The father who must answer one logistical question a week is still healing. The person whose situation requires a measure of contact they would never choose is still healing.

What changes is where you put your attention. The contact you cannot avoid does not get to fill your whole inner life. The minutes you spend on logistics do not get to define your day. The reach of someone else's presence stops at the edges of the necessary. Everything beyond that edge is yours.

Inside those limits, you still get to choose — in the small daily ways — what reaches you. You still get to decide what you read first in the morning. You still get to decide who you call when something good happens. You still get to decide where your imagination goes when you take a walk. You still get to decide the texture of your evenings, the music in your kitchen, the books you fall asleep with.

The required contact. The small inner margin kept around it. The steady understanding that the smaller the distance, the more carefully you tend the inner life that distance was meant to protect. That tending is itself the healing. You are doing it, even if it does not look like the stories you read.