Some Of Them Will Only Remember.

When you were in the depths of your struggle, they all saw it. Or parts of it. They picked you up when you got hammered, they noticed the scars, they watched you start arguments, they got the late-night phone calls, they were there for the breakdown in the grocery store. And you felt shame, humiliation, maybe anger toward them for bearing witness to your disaster. Resentment that they may never forget it.

If you are so fortunate as to have the resources – the money, the time, the energy – to get some version of help (therapy is far from the only answer), there is so often that nagging worry that they won’t ever forget what things looked like before.

You can stop worrying: None of them will forget. But that doesn’t mean they will always see you the same way. They will get to know the things about you you’ve uncovered that let you thrive, they’ll get to see you live the life you want, or so much closer to it. They’ll have enough time with you when all those things are true, that the old things will lose their relevance. They will come to see you as a healthy person who had a really, really bleak time.

Some won’t.

No matter how long it’s been since they bore witness to your suffering, to some, you will not be a healthy person who had a bleak time, you will be an ill person going through a period of wellness. You don’t know who will be whom. You don’t know if you will ever be able to persuade the hesitant ones into understanding you differently. Some of them, you won’t. Everyone will remember, but some of them will only remember. And you very well may notice those people a lot more than the rest because it feels terrible, and because you, too, may doubt the longevity of your wellness, and because we tend to remember things that confirm our worst fears about ourselves far more than the things that cause us peace.

So what does that mean for healing? For the worthiness of your work? Does it mean there’s no point in trying to feel better, do better, because some will only remember?

I can’t answer that for you. I know what I believe, to my soul, but I can’t answer it for you. So what I beg that you do is consider this: Is experiencing joy only worth it if someone experiences it beside you? Is the landscape only beautiful because someone else agrees? Would you stop listening to the music, if a theorist wrote an article on why it’s actually a waste? Is it only worth it to do a good deed if someone tells you it was, in fact, a good deed? Or is joy worth it for its own sake. Does the landscape bring more beauty to your world even if someone doesn’t prefer it. Can you still get lost in the sound even if someone tells you it’s not worth losing yourself inside. Is putting goodness in the world worth it, even if someone has other ways that they do good.

You will not convince everyone. Some people will leave, and they won’t return. Not because they’re bad people, and not because you’re one, but because their time with you, mixed with their histories, mixed with their lifestyles and relationships and their own mental health, mixed with the daily bullshit of being a person, makes your presence something that, for them, does not justify what it might cost. It is so painful. It can feel so shameful. And it doesn’t undo the healing, the recovery, the joy, the landscape, the music, the good. It is simply that some relationships end. You are not a hurtful person, but you may have hurt them too deeply in the depths of your darkness. You are not some overwhelming presence, but you may at one time have overwhelmed them past their openness or capacity. So you worked really hard, and people love you and are here for you through it. Other people are too hurt. Too overwhelmed. Too generally tired to risk it – and while you are not a risk, you did, at some point, represent one.

These things are true. And they’re okay. Because your darkness was so bleak, and your suffering was so soul-level, and you did things or engaged with people from places of bleakness and soul-level suffering. What else could you have done? You didn’t have the capacity to do the work, the time had not yet passed, and that was the best you could have mustered, then. And now it isn’t. Because at one point the answer to, “What else can be done?” would have very truly been, “Nothing.” And then somewhere it shifted, and the answer to, “What else could you do?” turned into “Try something else,” and so you did. I hope one day you know how awesome that is. I hope you know that trying, at anything, is one of the hardest things any person can do. (I think you did know it, and you tried anyway. Goddamn.)

Some people will only remember. You do not have to be one of them. Keep going.