I recently survived a very painful experience. The short version is that due to having too many things on my plate I wasn't taking very good care of anything in my life, including myself. I got to the point where I felt very overwhelmed, I felt like a complete failure, and I wanted to drink or kill myself.
I'm familiar with that pain - I've been there before. A lot. Something was different this time - despite the way I felt, I felt something more deep down. I felt a connection to the life I have today - my recovery, the people I have in my life, the things I'm doing. I knew deep down that what I was feeling wasn't really the truth about me.
So, I quit school. I did talk with a confidant before I did that. The reason I quit school is because it's not really necessary right now, and it was the activity in which I was not honoring my integrity. I was doing school like I used to do school - skimming the surface, not really learning, but just doing enough to get by. That's the way I used to live my life, and I know today it's the main cause of depression for me. The way my program at school was set up, I couldn't just take a break; I had to get out. I baffled my two instructors, because they were very pleased with the work I had done so far - I'd received perfect scores on everything. Yet I wasn't ok with the work I was doing, and more importantly, I wasn't okay with me. It's imperative to my recovery that I live in a manner that I'm ok with.
And after I quit school, most of the pain went away. Now I'm not really sure if I did the 'right' thing, and I'm not even sure there is a right thing; however, I know that I did something to stay in recovery, and, right now, that's the important part. The one thing I did right in this instance was treat my recovery like it is the most important thing in my life, which it is.
The pain was there all along (this is the start of the longer story). It starts with the thoughts, which lead to anxiety. Prolonged anxiety leads to depression. One of my challenges is self-discipline - I'm still a novice at that. So I didn't have a lot of self-discipline surrounding my school work. Eventually what self-discipline I did have unraveled, and I was doing next to nothing to take good care of myself. And I knew it. There has to be in my life a foundation of recovery, and I had let that foundation erode.
The pain I was experiencing was warning me that I was getting farther and farther out onto thin ice. It spoke to me in a way that I listened. I'm still a little in pain, because I have to repair my foundation; but I'm not in the kind of pain that makes me want to escape or die.
Sometimes we see recovery as two steps forward, one step back, and sometimes it is that way. That's why recovery can be frustrating, and why some people don't make it. It's not all rainbows and lollipops - it's a lot of hard work and character-building experiences. The way to make it easier is to listen to each of these experiences and learn as much as I can from them.
And that's how pain can be my friend and my teacher today, rather that something to be avoided and shooed away when it shows up on my doorstep.
Namaste,
Ken
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