When “Moving On” Isn’t the Goal
For a long time, I thought recovering from the assault would work the way recovering from surgery works. Follow the doctor's instructions, give it about six weeks, and go back to living the way I did before. That expectation didn't really come from any one person. It's more in the air than that, carried in the language that gathers around something hard, words like closure and getting past it and moving on. They're gentle words, usually meant kindly, and they all point toward the same finish line, a place where the difficult thing is over and you go back to being who you were.
In my own life, almost no one actually told me to move on. Most people didn't bring it up at all, partly out of love and partly because they weren't sure what to say. The pressure I felt wasn't really coming from them. It was the unspoken assumption, mine as much as anyone's, that healing was supposed to have an end date. It took me years to understand that the finish line wasn't coming, and that its absence wasn't a failure on my part.
Why do we treat healing like it has a finish line?
We treat healing like it has a finish line because the alternative is harder to accept. Closure is a tidy idea. It promises that pain is temporary and that effort is rewarded with a clean ending, the way a project closes out or a wound stitches shut. For the people standing next to someone who is hurting, a question like "are you doing better now?" is partly kind and partly hopeful. They want the answer to be a full yes, because a full yes would mean the hard part is over for you and, quietly, for them too.
I lived inside that hope for a while. I went back to my hot yoga class about a week after the assault, certain I could pick up right where I'd left off. I spent most of the class hyperventilating on the mat. My body had not gotten the memo that I was supposed to be fine.
What does integration actually look like?
Integration looks like the experience becoming part of your life without running it. It is the difference between erasing something and learning to carry it. Years after the assault, I still use a grounding practice I learned in those first months. When the floating feeling starts, the one where I'm watching myself from a few feet away, I put my hands on whatever is nearest and name what I can feel. I tell myself I'm in this chair. I look at my hands. That response never went away. What changed is that I know what it is now, and I know what to do when it arrives.
That same year I fell apart on the yoga mat, I went back again, and again, until yoga became one of the steadiest things in my life. I ended up getting certified and teaching for years. The thing that wrecked me became something I could stand on. Not because I got over it, but because I made room for it.
Does carrying something mean you haven't healed?
No. Carrying something and healing are not opposites; they happen at the same time. The trauma is still there. I will always have moments I have to work through. More than a decade on, there are still things that set off a fight-or-flight response, and I still reach for the same skills I learned at the beginning. By the surgery definition, that would mean I never finished. By the truer definition, it means I built a life that can hold what happened instead of pretending it didn't.
Some of the most important moving-forward I ever did looked nothing like progress. At one point, worn down by a legal process that had me reliving the worst night of my life over and over, I gave myself six months off to do nothing that resembled productivity. I had been working since I was fourteen, and stopping felt like falling behind. It turned out to be one of the most important things I ever did for myself. None of it would have counted as closure. All of it was healing.
What does any of this have to do with how we lead?
More than I expected. The experiences we never fully resolve don't stay in our personal lives. They come to work with us, shaping how we read a room, how we respond when something goes sideways, and how patient we can be with a problem that won't resolve on the first try. For years I led the way I'd lived. Make the list, work the list, and trust that any problem will shrink if I just stay productive enough. That approach carried me a long way. It also has a ceiling, and the years after the assault are where I first found it.
The same lesson shows up in my work too, with far less at stake. Plenty of the decisions I make running my business arrive without full clarity. The information is incomplete, the obvious answer isn't there, and waiting for certainty would mean never moving at all. What those years taught me is that you can keep going without a clean ending in sight. You take the next real step, let it show you something, and take another. The list still does real work. It just was never the whole job.
The goal was never to get back to the person I was before. She didn't have this in her, and I can't un-know what I know now. The goal I actually reached was a life roomy enough to hold all of it: the assault, the years after, the people who stayed, the work, the joy that genuinely came back. You don't have to erase something to live well. You make room for it, and you keep going, one next thing at a time.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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