Healing Wounds & the Scars That Remain

I've been thinking a lot about "being over" things. Are you ever truly and 100% over anything?
I'm not so sure... I think everything that happens to you leaves it's mark. These marks could be as small as a freckle or as big as a six-inch scar... Or, in extreme circumstances, as painful and obvious as a missing limb.
These marks also have the ability to change on a day-to-day basis. One day you barely notice the scar-it's tiny and easily covered up with makeup and your daily routine. You can go weeks or even months without noticing it or thinking about it-then BAM-you look in the mirror one day and wonder where all the blood came from. That emotional blood-the kind that others can't always see even at those times you can see it all over yourself and you're frantically searching for the source of the bleeding to stop it, and then desperately trying to clean it off while praying it hasn't stained anything.
Sometimes I think about guys from my past. Okay, sometimes may be the wrong word-we'll say often. Especially ones that keep coming back like herpes-you can't quite get them out of your life because they're always there in one way or another. You know the type, the ones that don't realize that exes should really just disappear and be dead to you. They want to be friends. They want to keep having something with you without giving you what you expected or wanted. It doesn't work that way.
A lot of the time I find myself thinking "what is wrong with him?" when thinking about past them as they pop-up and try to play it cool like there is no history there. Sometimes I get stuck stewing over their gall. Who do they think they are? How dare they think what happened doesn't matter! Over and over and over again in my head. This cycle repeats until one day, recently, I stopped and thought to myself "Wow, he's occupying way too much head space for someone you thought you were over... Why?" Well, because it's possible that you are never truly over anything entirely, and trying to pretend you are can be so misleading. You fool yourself into thinking you don't care about them any more, or that you don't hurt over the pain they caused anymore, and that can be damaging.
Don't get me wrong, there's a good amount of "fake it til you make it" that I believe in, but not if you aren't also honoring your feelings. Please, fake it til you make it-when you're out in public. Don't break down crying every time you're out and about and see something that reminds you of them or freak out at a friend who tries to console you but doesn't really understand... But when you are alone with you-you need to honor what you're feeling. You need to make peace with the fact that you feel that way before you can start working through it. You need to work through it before you can move on. Not "get over." Move on. Move forward.
So if you're reading this right now, and trying to ignore a nagging hurt in the back of your mind-don't. Say hello to that hurt. Embrace that hurt. Make friends with it and start moving it over into the realm of healing so that it will stop popping up and destroying you for ignoring it. I'm working on that now too, and we can do this together-a little love and a little friendship can go a long way in the healing process.