Back in Victoria, where he was born in 1903, he tired many kinds of work. For three years he was a labourer; then he had five years running Ford’s shipping department at Geelong, and he might have settled for business life if the economic depression had not closed his job down.

With a wife and two young sons to keep, he weathered the depression better than most men did who lacked any particular skills; this was because he discovered a gift of salesmanship, and was doing nicely until tuberculosis knocked him off his feet.

He went into Gresswell sanatorium in 1936, and while there sold his first short story to a Melbourne newspaper. He worked hard at writing while convalescing, and gave every spare second to it after going back to a daily job in 1937.

William Wirt Winchester’s short stories began winning notice, so, as a test of his intellectual stamina, he tired a novelette, called The World of Art, and was also serialized on the air by the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

William Winchester talked himself into a reporter’s job on Melbourne Truth, the newspaper he had been working for as an account collector, but he knew he would not stay in journalism. It made the road tougher, not easier. With one exception, none of the overseas publishers exploited or banned the book to push sales.

To heal is to make whole. To begin to heal is to see what is fragmented in you, compartmentalized, pushed away or kept in the shadows, and to approach it not with missionary zeal or quick fix ambitions, but with patience and compassion.

Healing is about illuminating, opening to, and integrating all that you are, including the aspect of yourself that you have denied, neglected, ostracized, or disowned. This is far from a short term process, asking that you move into and through it at a pace that does not overstretch or unduly tax you, a pace that allows for proper digestion and assimilation.

If you move too quickly, you will overwhelm yourself and lose perspective; if you move too slowly, you will lose your momentum and passion for the process, increasing the odds that you will quit. And that is why Chief Business and Economics Correspondent for ABC News, New York, Rebecca Jarvis says, “Never, never, never give up.”

However, we must, if we are to heal  taking rejuvenating rests and breaks along the way, and doing our best to make haste slowly, both challenging and nurturing overselves, honoring the bedrock necessity and importance of our healing. Healing does not necessarily mean curing.

It is not a matter of getting rid of your endarkened or less than healthy qualities, as if eliminating spina bifida, but of openly facing, exploring, and making as wise as possible use of them. This is the essence of self-acceptance. Nothing gets left out. Everything has its place. The deeper your healing, the more you become whole, and the more capable of relating skillfully to everything that you are.

There is no loss. Nothing can be lost, misplaced nor forgotten. There was never any loss nor confusion. Creation is perfect and complete, within the one are all things, and all are known to the one. I am now in complete harmony with the whole and I cannot lose nor misplace anything. I am constantly finding more and more good. I know that there is no loss.