"Time heals all wounds, unless you pick at them"
About this Quote
“Time heals all wounds” is the kind of tidy proverb athletes hear a lot: lose the big game, shake it off, next week is another snap count. Shaun Alexander’s add-on - “unless you pick at them” - is where the locker-room cliché gets teeth. It turns passive comfort into an active warning. Healing isn’t just something that happens to you; it’s something you can sabotage.
The intent feels practical, almost training-table advice for the mind. In sports, replaying a mistake is useful until it becomes compulsive film study of your own failures. “Pick at them” captures that self-destructive loop: reopening pain through rumination, grievance, or the urge to keep proving you were wronged. The phrase is bodily on purpose. Wounds aren’t metaphors in football; bodies bruise, scar, and sometimes never fully bounce back. By invoking the physical act of picking, Alexander suggests emotional recovery has the same rules as rehab: rest, patience, and discipline matter, but so does resisting the itch to interfere.
Subtextually, it pushes back against the cultural lie embedded in the original saying: that time is an automatic solvent. Time is neutral. What you do inside it - the stories you repeat, the anger you feed, the identity you build around hurt - determines whether the wound closes or festers.
Context matters, too. Coming from an athlete known for high expectations and public scrutiny, it reads like lived experience with pressure, criticism, and second-guessing. It’s a compact philosophy for surviving both injury and the Internet: heal, but don’t hand your pain the knife.
The intent feels practical, almost training-table advice for the mind. In sports, replaying a mistake is useful until it becomes compulsive film study of your own failures. “Pick at them” captures that self-destructive loop: reopening pain through rumination, grievance, or the urge to keep proving you were wronged. The phrase is bodily on purpose. Wounds aren’t metaphors in football; bodies bruise, scar, and sometimes never fully bounce back. By invoking the physical act of picking, Alexander suggests emotional recovery has the same rules as rehab: rest, patience, and discipline matter, but so does resisting the itch to interfere.
Subtextually, it pushes back against the cultural lie embedded in the original saying: that time is an automatic solvent. Time is neutral. What you do inside it - the stories you repeat, the anger you feed, the identity you build around hurt - determines whether the wound closes or festers.
Context matters, too. Coming from an athlete known for high expectations and public scrutiny, it reads like lived experience with pressure, criticism, and second-guessing. It’s a compact philosophy for surviving both injury and the Internet: heal, but don’t hand your pain the knife.
Quote Details
| Topic | Letting Go |
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