Pain Pt. 2: Find Your Pain, Find Your Purpose

While day-to-day pains are an obstacle to overcome in this life, there is also the presence of the behind-the-scenes bigger sources of grief to negotiate. Those big-picture scenarios that make you cringe or cause your heart to beat a bit faster are usually inauspicious evidence of your life’s necessary direction. The remnants of childhood scars or early adulthood trauma reverberate through your consciousness in a way that should compel you to act. These associations represent purpose, provided you don’t allow yourself to become paralyzed by them.

All grown people on this Earth have something that particularly stirs them; something that hits close to home each time they hear a story related to this particular place of pain. I am a firm believer that this painful association is a guidepost on the path down which we are individually called to tread. It is a shining beacon that calls us to act and to do and be something more than we are today. It is our purpose.

A person who was bullied or harassed as a child has a few choices to make as an adult: curl up into a ball every time they hear or see such behavior and encourage others to do the same, or become so enraged that they act impulsively and perhaps become bullies themselves. Another choice is to positively impact other former victims and to sew the seeds of self-defense, knowledge and high-mindedness amongst a new generation.

A person whose life has been touched by emotional, physical or sexual abuse can choose to be crippled by that pain (and no one could or would really blame them for being so affected, at least for a time) or they can recover from it and allow the experience to help them work to prevent that same abuse from befalling others. Their pain can push them into a place of advocacy and care that can positively impact hundreds or thousands of lives.

Finally, we come to my pain: addiction and compulsion. As a recovering addict whose addiction manifests itself in countless substances and behaviors, I know that I am in a unique position to be a voice of reason, experience and hope for others in recovery or those still struggling. I know this to be a particular part of my purpose in this life.  For a time, the humiliation of my struggle kept me from feeling like I was in a place of helping others, but I know now that all those hard times were simply forging the foundation of my life’s aim.

What is it that uniquely stirs in you a particular passion? What has been your struggle? Once you pay necessary mind to your pain, I urge you to look beyond the hurt and find your purpose and ACT on it. Life takes on a particularly meaningful glow from that point forward, just as it is supposed to. 

Turning Pain Into Progress

Life on planet Earth will forever be touched by pain and tragedy. No one is immune, regardless of race, belief or socioeconomic status. Much of the time we allow this pain to suck us in and keep us in stasis. We sit in it, mired in the muck of it until something or someone comes along to shake us from our stupor and help us remember the fundamental fact of life: it is meant to be lived.

Pain can become an excuse for dispassionate inaction. It is used as an excuse to disregard the outside world in the same way that a small child thinks you cannot see them if they cannot see you. It is (perhaps most unfortunate of all) an excuse to hurt others. We quite often will give another person a proverbial pass for terrible behavior because we think we may be just as bad to others if we ourselves were in the seat of suffering.

Inasmuch as pain can be a great burden, it can also be a fantastic motivator. You see, in the crucial moment we decide for ourselves which role it will fill in our lives. Pain reacts differently in the hearts and minds of different people, but in the time after the initial reaction our choices determine its’ effect. Pain can pull you down or it can push you into action.

Understand that the source of the pain can determine the initial course of action. If your pain is the result of a relationship gone awry, you first must distance yourself from the relationship. Then you have to become very intentional in your effort to redefine what qualities you are willing to accept within a relationship. If the source of your pain is an addiction or compulsion, the initial step is to stop drinking, using or acting out. Once you are removed from the haze of the high, you can look upon your life through clear eyes and with humility and open-mindedness you can move towards a better life.

Things become a little more difficult when the external “sources” of pain are stripped away and you begin to get honest with yourself about the fact that you may actually be the source of your own pain. Once you have come to realize this you have taken the first huge step in the direction of turning your pain into personal progress. You must know and understand why you’ve done the things you have done, and then you must address those root issues humbly and with a willingness to change.

Pain can fuel progress or paralysis, and it’s never too late to change the road you’re on as a result of making the choice of allowing your pain to consume you. Life is a series of choices. Even the most important of those choices can be redeemable when you decide that you want something better. Choose progress, and by so doing choose to live your own authentic life rather than settling for simply being alive. 

Four for 4

“Birthdays” don’t keep us sober, but taking a moment to recognize the milestone affords us the opportunity to positively reflect upon just how far we have come in the days and years since we last picked up the drink or drug. My life is nothing short of a miracle on even the worst days.

At the time of my birth, there was a genuine risk of being stillborn or brain dead due to my body’s position during the delivery. A bit more than twenty years later my life nearly ended on a grassy highway median. More than once in the years that followed I drank or used enough of other substances to have killed a person on multiple occasions. In spite of all this, I am still here. I’m alive and for the last four years I have really lived as well.

The days leading up to my sobriety birthday tend to both threaten and reinforce my sobriety. As counterintuitive as that may seem, you should certainly expect that type of duality from any addict. The weeks preceding November 4^th tend to find me emotionally drained as flashes of my old life and especially of that final binge play on the movie screen of my mind. If I am not mindful, I will begin to drift into a really negative and dark place. A time that should find me especially gracious and grateful will instead find me curt, angry and trying to isolate if I make the choice to focus on all that drinking and drugging took from me instead of all the things that sobriety has given me.

Gratitude is certainly one of the cornerstones of my sobriety and sanity; it is necessary to remain grateful in the constant battle against guilt, shame, self-pity and remorse. Gratitude is choice about your way of thinking and your way of living. Your ability to remain grateful in even the worst of times says a lot about how much you’ve grown emotionally or how much growing that still needs to be done.

Another of my cornerstones is the expansion of my spiritual life. While I am wholly faithful to my beliefs I am secure enough in them to allow you to have your own as well, even if they directly conflict with my own. Nothing about my life or my sobriety necessitates anything from anyone else, which helps me in my effort to stay clean and to stay I my own lane. I choose to live and let live; I also choose to pray for the very best for all of you at every chance I get.

A third cornerstone for me has been crafting a life that I no longer want to escape. It goes hand-in-hand with dealing with life on life’s terms and makes it a bit easier to do. You see as an active alcoholic and addict I was operating in cowardice behind a veil of bravado and hubris. If I could convince you of how great my life was, maybe I could eventually convince myself as well. I viewed everything through a lens of negativity, anger and pessimism and was so busy feeing sorry for myself that I forgot that I alone was responsible for the life I make for myself. When I got sober I learned that I had to stop blaming others, grow up and be willing to accept the consequences of my choices, good or bad. I made the choice to do what I could to make my life what I wanted it to be and that has made all the difference.

Last but not least is that which has been by far the most difficult and necessary part of this journey: becoming willing to love myself enough to want more out of my life than what I had become. I honestly struggle moment-to-moment each and every day with the two wolves inside my mind: one representing self-love and the other, older and stronger one that is representative of my self-loathing. While I choose to try and “feed” the self-love, the self-loathing has never known a moments’ hunger. My days consist of a million instantaneous decisions about how I’ll feel about myself and I don’t always make the right choice. Today, though, I at least have a choice to make. I am no longer bound and a slave to the hatred with which I regarded myself for far too long.

This has all been hard to reconcile at the most difficult times of these past four years; no one will ever tell you that life gets any easier when you get clean and sober unless they happen to be a pathological liar. Bad things happen in this world every day to nearly everyone. Life does, however, get better as you begin to understand what “normals” intuitively know from a young age: that this life is less about what happens to you than it is about how you handle it.  

Thank you to all who have chosen to walk this path with me, in person or in spirit. I would not be the man I am today without your patience, love and support. I hope and pray that we continue this journey for many, many more turns around the sun.