Our lives are not just "befores" and "afters"

"Through her therapy she was learning that though it was agony remembering, it was a much better quality of agony than not remembering."
From The Guardian, "The tsunami survivor who lost her whole family"

I wanted a lobotomy. I wanted someone to cut out the part of my brain where the painful knowledge sat. Or give me amnesia, like a soap opera character, that erased the worst memories, the ones that pinned me to my bed like a still-living corpse. 
The woman in the story, Sonali Deraniyagala, lot her family in, literally, one wave. Remembering for her is undoubtedly worse than it ever was for me. But, as I've written before, there isn't a painlympics. My pain counts. Yours too. (And yes, even his.) And so we learn from each other, including from a woman who, having lost every person she loved most in the world in one horrific tragedy, how to pick ourselves up and move forward.
For Sonali, and for me, healing came with remembering. 
Not right away. At first, it was too painful to remember the births of my children, the holidays together, the laughter. Those memories felt like they belonged to someone else, to another life. To a life that I was wondering if I'd imagined. 
But slowly, with time, I could let them in. The wedding album I'd relegated to the basement found its way upstairs again, ostensibly so my children could look at it but also because I could look at it too, without my stomach clenching. Or not clenching too much.
The photos I'd put in drawers, the jewellery I'd stopped wearing, the clothes that held memories, also made their way back into regular rotation. Not all of them. The chain of a diamond necklace remains, literally, in pieces somewhere at the back of my drawer. Certain clothes were bagged and dropped at a charity box. 
And I brought my memories here.
As I shared my story, over months and years, I exorcised those memories of "before" and knit them seamlessly with "after". I had never imagined that my life would ever again feel like it flowed. Always, always I figured that "the news" as Glennon Doyle refers to it, would remain an interruption, a dividing line between "before" and "after". And I suppose, to some extent it does. But not nearly the way it did. It has become something akin to the "before" we had kids, the "before" we moved to our house. A marker of time rather than a marker of trauma.
I've often said that I have two wishes for this site. The first is to create community around the experience of betrayal so that nobody feels as though they're going through this alone. And the second is to assure everyone, whether you're hours from D-Day or years, that you will get through this. 
Both are the absolute truth.
But the second requires a bit of heavy lifting on our part. It requires us to look square at our life and, with time, remember. To remember the good stuff and, yes, to remember the awful. To sit with the pain of remember that phone call, that text, that sudden knowing. To rest in the memory of your own strength through this. You're still here, right? That's courage and guts that you maybe didn't know you had. It's there. I promise.
Sonali Deraniyagala wrote her story and on those pages, she found healing. I too wrote my story, on this site and in my book. I've long advocated for the power of owning our stories, of reclaiming our memories and our truth. Betrayal challenges our perception of what's real and what's not. When we reclaim that – when we refuse to let others write our stories, when we insist on telling them with ourselves at the center – then our hearts again become whole.