The throne of the wound and My Renewal!

By Arian Galdini

Pain does not sanctify a person.

It can deepen him, but it can also deform him.

It can open his eyes, but it can also darken his judgment.

It can make him gentler toward others, but it can also give him a false permission to be unjust.

There are wounds that bring a person closer to mercy.

There are wounds that make him colder than those who hurt him.

That is why pain is not proof of truth.

It is the place where a person’s truth is tested.

The test is not only what happened.

The test is who began to rule inside the person after it happened.

Because the wound does not always seek healing.

Often, it seeks power.

It does not want only to be remembered.

It wants to sit where judgment sits.

It wants to speak in the name of memory.

It wants to take the shape of justice.

It wants to give orders in the voice of pain.

It wants to say, now you have the right to hate.

It wants to say, now you have the right to humiliate.

It wants to say, now you may hold the world responsible for what happened to you, even when the world is no longer there, even when the day is different, even when the person before you is not the one who wounded you.

This is how the wound asks for a throne.

And if a person gives it one, it no longer remains a wound.

It becomes a kingdom.

Then he no longer lives by truth, but by injury.

He no longer judges by justice, but by wounded memory.

He no longer speaks in order to build, but in order to make sure no one is allowed to forget his wound.

Every face becomes the repetition of another face.

Every disagreement becomes the continuation of an old injustice.

Every new day is placed under the law of the day that wounded him.

This is the deepest loss.

Not to be wounded.

To give the wound the throne.

The wound is not most dangerous when it hurts.

It is most dangerous when it begins to judge in your place.

It can sit so quietly in the heart that a person no longer distinguishes its voice from the voice of conscience.

It can look like care for dignity, when in truth it is revenge in disguise.

It can look like memory serving justice, when in truth it has taken the right to decide how you will love, how you will speak, how you will doubt, how you will punish, how you will live.

Memory has its place.

Forgetting is not always a virtue.

There are wounds that must be remembered, because to forget them would be to let injustice dress itself in innocence.

But memory must bear witness, not command.

It must stand beside conscience, not above it.

It must preserve the truth, not take power over the person.

The wound must have memory, but not government.

A person is not ruined because he remembers the wound.

He is ruined when the memory of the wound gains the right to decide in his place.

When it begins to tell him whom to trust, whom to despise, where to remain silent, where to strike, where not to forgive, where never to return.

Then the wound is no longer a wound.

It is an inner law.

It is a throne occupied by a false king.

Evil does not win only when it knocks a person down.

It wins more deeply when it persuades him to rise with its face.

When it teaches him its language.

When it convinces him that in order to protect himself he must trample, in order to survive he must sell, in order to win he must stain himself, in order not to be despised he must despise.

It does not want only the tired body.

It wants the way a person remains human.

This is why the hardest resistance is not seen at once.

It does not happen before the crowd.

It does not always look like victory.

It happens inside, in that silent place where a person decides whether he will preserve his judgment or hand it over to the wound.

There, without witnesses, much is decided.

There, a more just person may begin.

There, a more dangerous person may also be born.

There is a violence that does not always touch the body.

It goes before you.

It moves ahead like fog.

It enters rooms where you have not been.

It sits in people’s ears before your voice does.

When you arrive, you no longer arrive first.

A name has preceded you, a name no longer entirely your own, a shadow made from other people’s words, a false version of you that you must move away from the door before you can enter yourself.

This wound does not knock you down in the square.

It tires you at thresholds.

Before you speak of the work, you must break through suspicion.

Before you are heard, you must pass through a fog.

Before you ask for trust, you must face a version of yourself that arrived earlier and does not belong to you.

It is not violence with a shout.

It is the violence of arriving before you.

It damages your beginning before you begin.

But even there, a person decides.

He can say, I will become like them.

He can say, I will use the same language.

He can say, now everything is permitted to me, because once an injustice was done to me.

He can say, my wound will be my law.

Or he can say, no.

No, I will not let mud teach me to throw mud.

No, I will not let contempt give me permission to despise.

No, I will not let loneliness sell me to the first crowd that promises protection.

No, I will not let injustice make me unjust.

No, I will not let fatigue sit in the place where conscience must remain.

Resistance is not the absence of fatigue.

It is the refusal to give fatigue the throne.

A person can be tired and still be just.

He can be wounded and still remain gentle at heart.

He can have reason for anger and still refuse to make anger his language.

He can have reason to surrender and still return to the work.

This is not ease.

It is not a pose.

It is not a beautiful appearance for others.

It is the hidden work of the soul.

There are moments when a person does not ask for victory.

He asks only for a little peace.

There are nights when silence seems safer than speech.

There are days when truth walks slowly and slander arrives faster.

There are hours when the work seems more tired than injustice.

Then resistance does not look like heroism.

It looks like a person sitting down again at the table and continuing.

The table is more important than it seems.

Because hands, after the wound, can do three things.

They can rise in surrender.

They can close into revenge.

They can rest on the table for work.

There begins the difference between the person who was broken and the person who was wounded, but did not hand dominion over to the wound.

Surrender accepts the wound as fate.

Revenge accepts the wound as language.

Work turns the wound into a test that no longer commands.

The throne is the place where pain asks to rule.

The table is the place where a person returns so as not to be ruled by it.

I did not give the wound the throne.

I gave the hands the table.

This is not an easy sentence.

There is no immediate grandeur in it.

There is no quick applause.

There is no beautiful rescue.

There is only continuity.

One text after another.

One meeting after another.

One return after a fall.

One measured sentence when the wounded nerve asks for power.

One decision not to sell oneself when selling seems like salvation.

One door opened again, even after many doors have been closed by words you did not say.

The person who has nothing but continuity, in the end, has something that cannot be bought.

There is one last place inside a person that must not be sold.

He may lose money, name, protection, friends, opportunities, peace.

But if he preserves that last place, he is not yet defeated.

The greatest loss is not to be left alone.

It is to no longer be with oneself.

It is to win a day while losing the center that made you human.

That place is not preserved by great words.

It is preserved in small moments, when no one sees.

In the word not spoken, because it would have been low.

In the agreement refused, because it would have saved a day and lost a center.

In the silence kept, not out of fear, but because untruth must not take over the rhythm of life.

In the return to work when anger would have wanted a stage.

Here begins renewal.

Not as an easy name.

Not as an ornament of the wound.

Not as a return to a yesterday that must be idealized.

Renewal is the decision not to let the past gain the right to turn you into what wounded you.

It is rising again without amnesia.

It is continuity without poison.

It is a return to people without asking them to carry the whole weight of you.

It is the way a person says to himself, my pain will not be lord over my steps.

Renewal is the law of the person who is born again without becoming like what hurt him.

A person is not healed when he forgets the wound.

He is healed when the wound no longer rules.

I do not come to say that I am pure because I have suffered.

Suffering sanctifies no one.

I do not come to ask for blind trust.

I do not come to place my wound on the table as proof of my right.

I ask only for a more just judgment.

Look at the work.

Look at the continuity.

Look at the refusal to sell oneself.

Look at whether I became like what wounded me.

Look at whether I am still here.

A country that learns to mock people who do not sell themselves prepares itself to be ruled by those who sell themselves at a higher price.

A society that no longer knows how to distinguish resistance from noise, character from advertisement, continuity from passing outburst, slowly loses the ability to recognize the people it will need on its hardest days.

I have not returned in order to be believed because of my pain.

I have returned in order to be judged by my work.

I am standing again.

Not because I have not been knocked down.

Not because it does not hurt.

Not because I have forgotten.

But because I did not hand the wound the right to lead my life.

A person is not healed when the wound disappears.

He is healed when the wound remains in memory, but no longer sits on the throne.

Then the hands do not rise in surrender, do not close into revenge, they rest on the table, and life begins again, not as a denial of pain, but as testimony that pain no longer rules.

Arian Galdini