Your wounds. The things that happened to you — the loss, the betrayal, the violence perhaps, the childhood that should have been otherwise. These are real. They happened. The pain they left is real, and nothing in this chapter asks you to deny a single gram of it, and any teaching that uses the sky to dismiss the storm is a lie wearing this book’s clothes.

But somewhere along the way, quietly, the wound may have become a who. The hurt one. The betrayed one. The survivor. It happens innocently — pain that goes unwitnessed for long enough starts to feel like identity, because at least an identity is company. So check it, with all the gentleness in the world, against the one rule: the wound can be felt. It can be seen, grieved, told, treated. It appears — even now, perhaps, as a tightening somewhere in the body as you read. What it appears in was never cut. There is something in you the knife never reached — not because you armored it, but because it was never the kind of thing a knife can reach. You are not what happened to you. What happened, happened within what you are — like a storm written on the sky.

People who finally see this tend to weep, and the weeping is not sorrow. It is twenty, forty, sixty years of holding a character together, set down at last.