The thing is you don't have to, not completely at least. That's one of the traps most likely to get to you after going through something so awful. You think you need to go back to how you were before... but you can't. You're not that person anymore after that, not entirely, and that is one of the things you have to come to terms with. Hard as that is to do.

[Building himself up again had been the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life, and he'd mourned for a long time for all the parts of himself that he had lost.]