There are four years of my life that don’t exist in photographs. I thought by destroying every single one I could somehow erase that part of me. It worked for a while, but like a fossil suddenly exposed on a creek bank after layers of protective earth had eroded away, my past became visible. It seemed sudden and unexpected, but it wasn’t really.

Hidden things can’t stay hidden forever.

Fossils are exposed by erosion and excavation: some buried for millions of years. Our past selves are what? Years old? Maybe decades?

They layers they hide beneath are thinner than we think.

The gap between staying hidden and being exposed is a diaphanous membrane. It’s only a matter of time before that membrane disintegrates. Our choices are erosion or excavation. Both choices are hard as hell.

We can keep the self we want to hide tucked away, and let life slowly wear us down until we’re left raw, vulnerable and exposed, wondering how it happened when we’d hidden it so well. OR we excavate ourselves. WE do the HARD WORK of digging, our shoulders held back with the fierce beauty of resilience.

When the vestiges of our past selves are exposed in this way, WE control the narrative of our own story.

I’m writing these words from the other side of my own excavation. The digging can be a path to healing. And friend, you don’t have to bear the load alone. You can find a guide for the journey.

A few years ago, I worked with a therapist who took me across the terrain of my past, handed me a shovel and said, “Dig here.”

I dug until my hands were raw and blistered and the fossils of my past selves were laid bare. They had borne the crushing weight of my own shame for too many years. I looked at them in that moment, simultaneously fractured and whole; preserved for all those years, waiting for me to recognize not just their brokenness, but their beauty.

Sometimes things need to stay hidden for a time. Our bodies find a place to hide the traumas from our pasts until we are ready to look at them with a little distance, a shift in perspective. Our bodies whisper to us, “Hush, now. Don’t worry. Hide yourself here for awhile. I’ll take care of you. Come back when you are ready. You are safe. You are safe. Darling, you are safe.”