Time doesn't heal wounds.
That's a lie we tell ourselves when the pain feels too big to carry. Time passes, indifferent to our suffering, marking days on calendars while we bleed in silence.
For years, I waited for time to do its supposed magic. I counted anniversaries, thinking each one would hurt less than the last. I measured my pain in months and seasons, expecting the calendar to perform miracles I couldn't manage myself.
But time only does one thing: it creates space and distance. A gap between what happened and what happens next. What fills that space is entirely up to us.
Healing began when I stopped waiting and started choosing. When I took responsibility for my own recovery instead of hoping the universe would fix me. When I admitted that nobody was coming to save me from my memories—not therapists, not medication, not well-meaning friends with their careful words.
The first choice was the hardest: to look directly at what I'd been avoiding. To sit with the weight of my experiences without flinching away. To stop running from the dark corners of my mind where the most brutal truths lived.
Taking risks came next. The risk of being vulnerable in therapy. The risk of trusting people with pieces of my story. The risk of believing that growth was possible, even when every instinct screamed that I was too broken to mend.
I risked opening up when it would have been safer to stay closed. I risked hope when despair felt more familiar. I risked connection when isolation had become my default armor.
But the hardest choice was letting go. Not forgetting, which is impossible, but releasing my death grip on grief. Loosening my fists around the pain I'd been clutching like a lifeline.
For so long, my wounds had become my identity. Who would I be without them? How could I honor what I'd lost if I stopped carrying it like a weight on my back?
The answer came slowly: I could carry the memory without drowning in it. I could honor the past without living in it. I could acknowledge what shaped me without letting it define my future.
Letting go isn't a single moment but a daily practice. Some days I'm better at it than others. Some mornings I wake up and have to choose to be responsible for my healing, to take the risk of hope, to release what no longer serves me.
Time creates the space for these choices, but it doesn't make them for us. Twenty years can pass with no healing at all if we don't use them wisely. Or profound transformation can happen in a single moment of choosing differently.
The mountains taught me many things, but this lesson came in the quiet afterwards: healing isn't passive. It's not something that happens to you while you wait. It's something you actively pursue, one choice at a time, one risk at a time, one small act of letting go at a time.
These days, I measure my progress in a different way. Not in how much time has passed since the worst moments, but in how many times I've chosen to keep growing despite them. How many risks I've taken toward wholeness. How many small acts of release have added up to something larger.
Time didn't heal me. But it gave me the space to heal myself. And in that space, I learned that recovery isn't about returning to who you were; it's about becoming who you're meant to be after everything you've survived.
The calendar keeps turning, marking days and years. But now I know what to do with the time it gives me. I choose responsibility over resignation. Risk over safety. Release over holding on.
Time doesn't heal. But choice does. One decision at a time, one day at a time, one moment of letting go at a time.
And in those choices, in that space time creates, healing becomes possible. Not as something that happens to us, but as something we actively create from the raw materials of our pain, our courage, and our willingness to keep growing into the light.