Offering my hand to darkness and pain

As a child, I never quite got what was happening around me. Some might argue I had a not-so-great childhood, but I don’t quite remember those bits. I remember playing and running around, but never quite fitting in. I remember the way people looked at me, like I was strange, different than who I was supposed to be. I reacted in ways they didn’t expect and said things they couldn’t quite understand. They looked at me like I was different. But I wasn’t. Looking back, I was just a normal child in a strange family. A family that I love, quite frankly, but who didn’t understand me enough to love me back. Or at least that's what I felt for a long time.

As I look back on my childhood, I can see the oddities. I can see the fights of my parents that I somehow ignored and the fear and pain of my siblings that I overlooked. People always asked me if I cried when my parents got divorced. I never understood their incredulity when I said I hadn’t. That too passed me by like it was normal. I accepted it like it was okay, like it wouldn’t impact my whole life in the future.

The truth is that I was only shielding myself from the pain with a blanket of apathy. I remember slowly forgetting how to feel. I remember starting to notice somewhere deep inside me that I didn’t feel joy like I used to anymore. I also didn’t feel any pain. I remember starting to notice how my life had turned out to be just something passing by me. I never truly lived it, never accepted responsibility for it, never dared to make a decision.

At some point, I started to allow myself to feel again. I remember telling myself, "Life is like a roller-coaster – it has ups and downs. You can’t feel the ups if you don’t feel the downs.". I started to tell myself it was okay to feel. I started to make choices and live a little. Slowly, I was getting there. I started to feel pain again, but I also started to feel joy. I rejoiced.

And then something happened. I got hurt badly. The pain wouldn’t stop, so I did the only thing I knew how to do. The thing I was so used to that it became my safety vest, the thing that would make the pain stop. I turned to apathy.

So for some time, I went back to the same routine of not living. The same routine of not feeling, of not deciding. I let life pass by me again. It was harder than before, because I knew what was waiting on the other side. I knew the feelings I was shutting out, only to keep myself from hurting. But something was stronger than me. Years of shutting out the world were pressing down on me, as if the heavy blanket that I used to protect myself with was now choking me. And I couldn’t get it off.

Each time I opened the door to my feelings, I could see only pain and darkness. Each time I left the door open just a crack for a bit, trying to feel something else, I would only feel pain and darkness. I cried every day for months. I fought with the few people I had in my life, only to be hurt again, inviting more pain in. I drowned more and more until I couldn’t breathe.

Change is one of the hardest things to do. Even the change from a bad habit to a good one is hard. The change from a bad place to a good one is hard. I have grown comfortable in my misery. It’s familiar and warm. The darkness knows me well. It hugs me tightly in its embrace and doesn’t let me go.

So one day, I reached out to my darkness and my pain and grabbed them by the hand. I started to accept the new me. I was dark. I was in pain. This was me. I started to accept that no one would come to rescue me. I started to accept that my life was a misery and I made it that way. I started to accept the things that happened that couldn’t be changed.

When pain hurts so much, I might as well just die from it; when darkness is so dark, I might as well just drown in it. That’s when I know I can make the change. Because nothing can feel worse than it.

Honestly, I thought this acceptance would make things different instantly, but it didn’t. The process was, and still is, painfully slow. Every day I pick my skin until it bleeds because of the anxiety, pain and fear. I end up shutting myself off from the world often, hiding in videos and movies and music and images, trying to run away from my feelings. I feel like every day I am walking a fine line between being fine and a complete collapse. But I have been feeling again.

Sometimes, the sun shines through the window just right, or the air outside feels perfectly fresh, or the stars greet me from behind a cloud, and in those moments, I feel just a tiny bit of joy again and hope for a better future. In those moments, I know I’m not only darkness and pain, but also light and love. In those moments, I dream again, and I feel alive. I breathe in deeply and smile just a bit.

Because feeling is the greatest joy of all.

- From My True Self