The wound that blessed you is all you can give
Some part of you did not heal. A loss, a diagnosis, a failure you never talk about, a childhood that still runs the show on your bad days. You could point to it with your eyes closed. People have also told you, kindly and often, what you should do with that place: heal it, hide it, or (the modern version) turn the whole business into a story that ends well.
This piece says something else. Your unhealed place is all you have that is worth giving to anyone. Your advice, your calm and your competence do not count, because anyone can find those elsewhere and you can fake them on a bad day (and you do, don't you?). The wound cannot be faked, and that is the reason it is the one gift that reaches.
So forget about getting rid of it (you could not, even if you tried). What you can do is give it, because a blessing, as you will see, was never the kind of possession you keep in a drawer.
Nearly everything you give people can be faked
Think of what you give people in a week. You give them advice, which you got from a book or a podcast (and which they could have found there too). You give them comfort, in words you have said so often that they come out in the right order without you. You give them attention, which anyone can perform once they have learned to nod at the right moments. You give them money, time, a favour, a well-chosen present.
None of this is bad, and you can give all of it from behind a front. You can console someone while your mind is on your own trouble. You can listen with your whole face and none of yourself. People accept these gifts, they say thank you, and they stay exactly as hungry as before, because what they received came from an arranged version of you, not from you.
Now, you probably do this with the best intentions, and so do I. But think about what you remember receiving from anyone. It is rarely their competence. It is the one time somebody let you see that they, too, were not all right, and did not take it back the moment you had seen it. That was not a performance, and you knew it at once. What they gave you in that moment was not a skill. It was their wound.
What I said before about your wound still stands
Last month I wrote that your unhealed wound is your strength. The open wound is where you cannot pretend, because you have nothing left there to dress the truth up with. I have not changed my mind about a word of it, and nothing here asks you to give any of it up.
Here I ask a different question. My August post looked at what the open wound does for you: it keeps you honest, and it keeps you where you stand. Today I look at what it does for whoever happens to be in front of you.
The two do not compete. A strength you keep to yourself is still a strength. A blessing you keep to yourself, however, is not yet a blessing at all, and the reason is in the word itself.
In Greek, to bless is to say a good word
In my language the word for blessing is ευλογία (eulogia), and it is made of two smaller words: εὖ, which means well, and λόγος, a word. A blessing is a good word, said by one person over another. Latin built its own word the same way, benedicere, to speak well. So whatever the English word has come to mean (a piece of luck, or the blessings you are told to count), the older meaning is simple: a blessing is not owned. It is said, and it exists only while it is being said to someone.
Now ask which good word you can say to another person. Praise? It can be flattery, and the flattery shows. Advice? It comes off a shelf. Reassurance? You have probably handed it out a hundred times while thinking of something else. Someone who is absent can say every one of these.
One word cannot, and that is the true word about yourself: where it still hurts, what did not heal, what you cannot do any more. Only you can say it, and only from the place where it is true. Said to someone, that word is a blessing in the old sense: good because it is true, and given because it is spoken to them. A Lebanese poet said as much a century ago, without any Greek.
Gibran said you only truly give when you give yourself
Kahlil Gibran was born in a mountain village in Lebanon in 1883 and was taken to Boston as a boy. In 1923 he published a small book in English called The Prophet. There, a man named Almustafa, about to sail home after twelve years abroad, answers the questions of the people he is leaving. A rich man asks him to speak of giving. The answer opens with a line most people have heard and few have taken seriously: "You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."
Then Gibran asks what possessions are, and answers himself: "things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow." That is a fair description of most of what you hand people. Even your kindness can be a possession, kept in reserve and dispensed in measured amounts.
Your wound is different: you cannot keep it in reserve. It is not a possession, because you never chose it and you cannot put it away. That is why, when you give it, you are giving yourself and nothing less. Your wound is your gift, in Gibran's sense of the word. He put the whole teaching into a book of little more than a hundred pages.
A blessing passed on is not a blessing lost
Here, at the point of giving yourself, is where most people stop. If I give this away, they think, I will have less of it. Or worse (and this fear is not stupid), someone will use it against me. Or, the quiet one: it is mine, and nothing else is.
Look at what a blessing is, though, now that you have the word right: a good word, said. When you say a word to someone, do you have less of it afterwards? You have more, if anything, because now you have said it, and it lives between two people instead of inside one. The wound behaves the same way. Handing it on does not subtract it from you. You keep every bit of it, which you could not help anyway, and the other person now carries a share.
By the way, none of this is about attachment or its opposite. No one is asking you to drop the wound, only to stop guarding it as if it were the last coin in the house. A guarded blessing is a possession. A blessing you pass on is still yours, and now it is also theirs.
You hand your wound on by letting it be seen
So what does giving a wound look like, in practice? You do not give it by talking about it at length. A wound explained is a wound managed, and whoever is listening receives the management, not the wound. And you do not give it by displaying it either, as if the wound were a qualification.
You hand it on by not arranging your face when it shows. You give it when you answer "how are you" truthfully once in a while, in a plain voice, and then do not rush to make them comfortable about it. You give it when your hands shake, or your voice stumbles, or your eyes fill, in company, and no apology comes attached. You need not say anything about it at all. The other person sees, and their shoulders come down. Half the time they answer with a wound of their own.
That is all it takes. No one signs for anything. You did not perform, and they did not applaud. A blessing changed hands in the old way, as a word does, and both of you have it now.
Tell one person the one thing you always leave out
This week, try something small. Think of it as neither a confession nor a speech. Pick one person you already trust a little, and choose the sentence you edit out of every account of yourself (there is always one). You know which one it is. You knew before you finished reading this paragraph.
Say it to them once, in ordinary words, and stop. Do not explain it, do not soften it with a joke, and do not manage what their face does next. Let the silence after it be as long as it needs to be.
Then notice what comes back. It is usually not advice. It is usually a sentence of their own, one that they, too, always leave out. If that happens, you have just been blessed in return, in the oldest sense of the word. Neither of you had to be anything other than what you are. And if nothing comes back, you have still given the one gift you have that no one can fake. The gift does not need a reply.
My stroke had to happen for me to reach you
Let me end with my own. In 2024 I had a series of strokes. My speech is slower now, and it stumbles on certain words (usually the one I most wanted to land). The singing voice I loved has not fully come back. A health anxiety arrived with them, too, one I did not have before.
At first I counted all of this as subtraction: less voice, less certainty, less of me to offer anyone. Then I understood something I still find hard to say…
… It had to happen. I do not mean as a punishment or a lesson. I mean so that I could not only reach the people who need what I do, but actually touch them.
You see, what I can give you now is exactly what I lost. A voice that stumbles cannot pretend, so whatever it says is true. Frightened as I sometimes am about my own body, I cannot play the guru, so I do not. Everything I was afraid would disqualify me is what gets through.
Whether it gets through to you, I cannot promise. I need you to take it, so that I can give it.
Your wound stays with you whatever you do. What you decide is whether anyone else ever receives it. It is the only blessing you have to give, and somebody needs it.