Time heals all wounds. Or does it?

 “Time heals all wounds.” It sounds wise and very grown up. It is the kind of sentence people say when they want to comfort you but don’t quite know what to do with your pain. “Give it time, it will pass.” As if time is a doctor making house calls, carrying a stethoscope, painkillers and bandages, checking in on our broken places.

But is time really a doctor?  In the simplest way I can think of it, time is a clock, and I do not think clocks heal anything. Very simplistic, I know, but hear me out…

There is something convenient about believing that time will fix things for us. It means we don’t have to confront anyone. We don’t have to apologise or revisit uncomfortable conversations. We don’t have to admit we were hurt, or worse, that we hurt someone else. We can simply wait. Waiting may feel passive but it also feels responsible, like we are giving space for maturity to do its thing.

And yet waiting is not the same as healing.

I know this because today, while I was out walking, I came across a child being scolded by her mother. The mother was accusing her of doing something wrong, and she kept insisting that she had not done it. There was urgency in her voice, that desperate need to be believed. It was as if she was not just arguing but defending herself. Whether she was guilty or not almost didn’t matter. What caught me was the look on her face. It was that mixture of confusion, frustration, and quiet panic when your truth feels invisible.

As I walked past them, something tightened in me…

… a memory from my own childhood that still stings. I was beaten for something I did not do. My brother had done it, but I took the punishment. I remember trying to explain but not being heard. I remember the helplessness more than the pain.

Years have passed since then. We are grown. Life moved on, as it always does. But standing there on that road, watching that child insist on her innocence, I felt the old sting rise again. The unfairness and humiliation. The quiet anger of not being believed.

Time has passed, but the memory clearly has not.

And if I am honest, every time I retell that story, even 35 years later, I relive it, keeping it warm. This then makes me question the phrase we repeat so easily. What exactly did time heal?

If time heals all wounds, why are some people still angry about things that happened in 1990? Why do old family disagreements resurface at Kwanjulas (traditional weddings) and funerals as if they happened yesterday? Why do certain apologies still feel necessary even after decades have gone by? Time clearly passed, but something inside remained the same.

Maybe it is because time itself does nothing. It simply creates space. What we do inside that space is what determines whether something heals or hardens.

Healing requires intention, conversation, perspective, humility, sometimes forgiveness, sometimes boundaries. It requires us to look at the wound without being too dramatic and without dismissing it. It may require hearing the other side. It may require admitting that we have been carrying a hurt longer than necessary. Time can give us the distance to reflect, but the reflection itself is still a choice we need to make.

And then we rarely acknowledge that sometimes, time makes wounds worse. Unattended pain does not disappear but it changes shape. It becomes resentment and mistrust. It becomes a lens through which we interpret everything else. Then the memory itself changes in subtle ways until the original event is no longer just an experience but an identity. “I was wronged.” “I was overlooked.”  “I was not believed.” The longer something goes unaddressed, the more it embeds itself into who we think we are. 

Time then does not soften that by default. In some cases, it cements it.

From where my feet are, I am beginning to suspect that time is neutral. It does not take sides. It does not repair relationships. It does not issue apologies, nor does it whisper forgiveness into our hearts. It simply moves forward, whether we have dealt with our wounds or not.

Some pains fade because we process and address them. Some change because we gain perspective. Some dissolve because we choose to forgive. But others linger, not because time failed, but because we never confront them. We leave them to age instead of addressing them.

So perhaps the saying needs revision. Time does not heal all wounds. It reveals which wounds we are willing to treat and which ones we would rather keep telling as stories. So maybe it is not whether time heals, but what we are leaving to time, that actually requires courage to face.