Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

There is a sentence we offer each other the way we offer a tissue at a funeral: Time heals all wounds. It sounds kind. It sounds wise. It sounds like something carved into a soft-focus Hallmark plaque with a bird and a branch and a reassuring serif font.

It is also, very often, complete nonsense.

Some wounds do not heal. Some wounds don’t even politely scar over. Some wounds deepen. They grow roots. They become load-bearing. They shape the architecture of who we are and how we move through the world.

Time doesn’t always heal. Sometimes time just gives the wound more room.

We tell ourselves this lie because we are terrified of the alternative. The alternative is admitting that some things are permanent. That some losses are not “processed.” Some betrayals are not “worked through.” Some harms are not “integrated into a growth narrative.” Some events are not chapters. They are fault lines.

And time, that great accomplice, doesn’t fix them. It just keeps adding weight.

Grief is a good example. Anyone who has actually lost someone they truly loved knows the truth: you don’t “get over” it. You get around it. You build a life that carefully avoids putting too much pressure on the broken place. You learn which days are load-bearing and which days you can barely hold yourself upright.

At first, the pain is sharp. Later, it is dull. But dull does not mean gone. Dull means it has spread.

Trauma works the same way. The nervous system keeps receipts. The body keeps the score. Time does not negotiate with memory. It does not argue with fear. It does not convince the amygdala that everything is fine now, thank you very much.

And then there are the wounds inflicted not by accident, not by fate, not by nature—but by other human beings.

Betrayals. Abandonments. Violations. The slow, grinding injuries of being lied to, used, discarded, or erased.

Those don’t heal. Those calcify.

Time doesn’t make them smaller. Time just teaches you how to live with a limp.

On a national level, we do this same magical thinking. We tell ourselves that if we just wait long enough, the country will “move on.” That injustices will fade. That horrors will recede into history. That institutions will self-correct. That cruelty will exhaust itself.

It doesn’t.

Unhealed wounds fester. Personal ones do. Collective ones do too.

What isn’t reckoned with is repeated. What isn’t repaired becomes tradition. What isn’t named becomes policy.

Time doesn’t heal racism. Time doesn’t heal authoritarianism. Time doesn’t heal stolen rights, stolen lives, stolen futures. Time just normalizes the damage. It just teaches people how to step over the blood without looking down.

There is another lie tucked inside the first one: that if something still hurts, you’re doing grief wrong. You’re holding on too long. You’re not “resilient” enough. You haven’t “done the work.”

Sometimes the work is simply learning to live honestly with the fact that something broke and will never be the same.

Not everything is a comeback story.

Not everything is a phoenix.

Some things are just losses. Some things are just ruins. Some things are just places you do not build houses anymore.

This doesn’t mean despair. It means realism. It means maturity. It means we stop gaslighting ourselves and each other with spiritual platitudes and start telling the truth: healing is not guaranteed. Closure is not owed. Resolution is not mandatory.

What is possible is meaning. What is possible is choice. What is possible is deciding what we carry, how we carry it, and what we refuse to pretend is fine.

Time does not heal all wounds.

But honesty can keep them from poisoning everything else.

And sometimes that’s the bravest, most radical form of survival there is.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

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