Someone asked me why I still post audio excerpts from my book and suggested that perhaps I should “get over it” and stop revisiting the past.
What they don’t realize is that the book was written, processed, and published over a year ago. Recording and sharing it in audio format is not an act of reliving those experiences. It is an act of making the work accessible to people who never had the opportunity to read it, or who connect more deeply with spoken word than with printed pages.
A published book does not cease to exist because the author has healed. It remains on shelves, in libraries, on Amazon, and in the hands of readers long after the emotions that inspired it have transformed. We do not remove art from the world simply because its creator has moved beyond the circumstances that gave rise to it.
What continues to surprise me is how often people assume that speaking about a painful experience means being trapped within it. In my experience, the opposite is often true.
