What the Far Shore Is Made Of | Getting Past the Hurt

On release, and on the crossings that never finish

Everyone wants to know how the story ends. After the wound and the change and the long crossing, they want the far shore, the place where it is finally over, where the two people stand in clean light with the fog behind them and the account closed and the past finally, fully past. I understand the wanting. I have felt it in my own chest, that hunger for the scene where everything resolves and the credits roll and we are told, at last, that it was all worth it. But I have lived long enough now to tell you something about that shore, and I want to tell it plainly, because the false version of it has ruined more people than almost anything else I know. The far shore is not the end of the pain. The far shore is the end of being ruled by it. Those are not the same country, and mistaking one for the other will keep you from ever landing anywhere at all.

Let me say first what release is not, because we are sold a counterfeit of it everywhere we turn. Release is not forgetting. The mind that truly forgot would have learned nothing, and a person who learned nothing from their deepest wound has not healed, they have merely misplaced the lesson until it comes due again. Release is not the feeling of warmth toward the one who hurt you, though that may come and it may not, and its coming is not the measure of anything. Release is not the moment you no longer remember what happened. If anything, release often arrives with the memory fully intact, sharp as it ever was, every detail preserved. What has changed is not the memory. What has changed is that the memory has stopped issuing orders.

Because that is what an unhealed wound really is. It is a memory that still commands. It sits in the seat of authority and it dictates the terms of your present, tells you who to trust and who to flinch from, decides in advance how each new day is allowed to go. And it does this in the name of protection, always in the name of protection, which is why it is so hard to depose. It presents itself as your loyal guardian right up until the moment you realize it has become your jailer. Release is the day the memory is moved out of the seat of command and into its proper place, which is the archive. It is still there. You can go and read it anytime, and sometimes you will need to. But it no longer runs the country. It has been returned to what it always should have been, a record of something true that happened once, rather than a government ruling everything that happens now.

And here is what I have found about how that transfer of power actually occurs, because it does not happen by force. You cannot evict a wound by deciding to. You cannot white-knuckle your way to release, cannot declare yourself healed and make it so, cannot forgive as an act of will and expect the body to comply. Everyone who has tried this knows how it fails. The declared forgiveness sits on top like oil on water, and underneath, the old alarm still fires exactly as before. Release is not seized. It is grown, in conditions that permit it, the way certain things only grow in certain soil. And the soil is made of one thing above all others, the thing I keep returning to across all of these pages, because it turns out to be the whole matter. The soil is made of being witnessed. The wound loses its command not when it is argued with but when it is finally, fully seen. When someone, even if that someone is only yourself, turns toward the one who suffered and says the sentence that was never said, and means it, and stays. That was real. It cost you. I see it now. I am not going anywhere.

The wound has been screaming that sentence at you for years, you understand. Every time it fired its alarm, every time it distorted a clean question into an old accusation, it was not trying to ruin your life. It was trying to get you to look at it. The alarm was the only language it had. And the strange mercy is that the moment it is truly seen, it begins to quiet, because it no longer has to shout to be heard. It was never asking to run your life. It was only asking not to be abandoned again, the way you were abandoned in the moment it was made. Witness the wound and you take away its reason to command. It can finally rest, because someone finally stayed.

Now I have to say the hard part, the part I have been circling this whole series and can no longer avoid. Sometimes the crossing does not finish. Sometimes you do all of this, the witnessing, the slow release, the years of the small font, and the other person still cannot land on the far shore with you. Sometimes the one who was hurt goes to the end of their life still braced against a version of you that stopped existing decades ago. Sometimes the one who changed dies with people still holding him as the man he no longer was. The fog does not always lift for both. The crossing is not guaranteed to complete, and any honest account of this territory has to be willing to stand in that grief rather than promising a resolution it cannot deliver.

So what then? If the other person never crosses, was any of it worth doing? And here is where everything I have written comes to its actual point, the thing underneath all four of these essays, the spine that the whole body was built around. The far shore was never, finally, about the other person. It was never about being believed, or being trusted, or being met, or reaching a clean scene of mutual healing where both parties arrive together in the light. All of that is grace when it comes, and it comes more often than the cynical believe, and you should reach for it with everything you have. But it cannot be the ground you stand on, because it depends on someone else’s country, and you cannot build your foundation in a land you do not govern. The far shore is inside you. It always was. It is the place you reach when your own wound stops ruling you, whether or not the other person ever changes their picture of you, whether or not they ever put down their brace, whether or not the crossing between you ever completes at all.

This is the release that no one can refuse to grant you, because it does not require their participation. The one who was hurt can reach it even if the one who hurt them never becomes safe, never apologizes, never changes at all, because their release was never contingent on the other’s transformation. It was contingent on witnessing their own pain and taking back the seat of command. And the one who changed can reach it even if no one he wounded ever believes he changed, because his transformation was never for the audience, it was the becoming of a self that exists whether or not it is seen. Both shores, it turns out, are the same shore. The wounded and the wounding arrive, if they arrive, at the identical place, and it is not a place of being finally understood by the other. It is a place of no longer needing the other’s understanding in order to be free.

That does not make the loss nothing. If the crossing does not complete, that is a real grief and it should be grieved, fully, the way you would grieve any death, because something did die, a possible closeness that will now never exist. Do not let anyone tell you to skip that mourning. But grieve it from the far shore, not from the fog. Grieve it as a free person mourning a real loss, not as a captive still waiting for the jailer to change his mind. There is all the difference in the world between those two griefs. One is the clean sorrow of a whole person. The other is the endless ache of a life still held hostage to an outcome that may never come.

I think of my wife’s words one final time, because they contain, I have come to believe, the entire teaching. I know you are not like that anymore. And, do not take my pain from me. Do not act like it did not happen. Hold those two sentences up to the light together and you will see they are not a contradiction. They are the far shore itself, described from the inside by someone standing on it. She had released me and kept her pain in the same breath, which is the thing we are told is impossible, and it is not impossible, it is simply the mature shape of a healed heart. She had moved the wound from the seat of command, so that it no longer ruled how she saw me. And she had kept it in the archive, honored, intact, refusing to let anyone pretend it was not real. That is not a person still trapped in the fog. That is a person who has crossed, and who is telling me, from the far side, that crossing does not mean forgetting, and freedom does not mean the wound was small. She was free and she was carrying it. Both. At once. On purpose.

That is the far shore, then. Not a place where the pain is gone, but a place where you carry it instead of being carried by it. Not the end of memory, but the end of memory’s reign. Not a scene of perfect mutual resolution, though may you be granted that where it is possible, but a solid ground beneath your own feet that no one else can flood, because you built it out of the one material that belongs entirely to you, which is the willingness to finally witness your own life and to stay. The fog may still come. The other person may never cross. But you will be standing somewhere the fog cannot reach, on ground you made yourself, carrying what is yours to carry, ruled by none of it. Free. Not because it did not happen. Free because it happened, and you saw it, and you are still here.