August 15th 2016 -The Pain
I was alone with my emotions, learning to sit with them. In the discomfort. This was not an easy task. I reflected a lot on my old habits, longing to return to what seemed to be easier. But I was determined to create change in my life, to feel the emotions instead of avoiding them.
There is an ebb and flow to everything. Life is a vast ocean.
When things get turbulent we learn to ride the waves.
I try to stay on top of things. Set goals and achieve them. Catch negative thoughts and think positive thoughts instead. Yet sometimes I find myself in a bad state of mine. A place that is all too familiar in all the bad ways.
I look at the cut on my hand. A clumsy scratch from work, but it has a familiarity. I catch myself wanting more. Wanting to cut myself. A horrific thought, I know. Something I thought I had overcome years ago. I have! I won’t act on those thoughts, but they shouldn’t even be there. How could I possibly still desire to cut myself—to cause that pain, to create those scars—after all these years? After how far I’ve come. It just creeps up out of nowhere.
It reminds me that I’m feeling emotional. That I still don’t know how to deal with my emotions. I want to control them. I want to feel good and ignore the bad. I catch myself feeling sad and lonely and I want to cut myself to create real physical pain in order to escape the emotional pain.
Because I can deal with the physical pain.
Why can’t I deal with the emotional pain?
Why am I so afraid to feel?
Why can’t I embrace my emotions and truly let myself feel them instead of trying to escape?
Trying to ignore them. They aren’t going away.
I’m human.
Fuck I hate being human sometimes.
I hate how much the outside world effects my emotions.
It makes me feel weak. I hate feeling weak more than anything. Weakness is my biggest insecurity. Maybe that’s why I think of cutting—to overcome the weakness. To punish myself for being weak. To feel strong through the physical pain. To overcome it.
I don’t think I would enjoy it now. Yet that curiosity whispers in the back of my mind, lingers, wondering. I’ve come too far to ever give in to such a negative action. To cut would be a sign of weakness, and I am better than that. I am stronger than that. I’ve overcome that darkness. Maybe those lingering thoughts are just a reminder of how far I’ve come, and how strong I am now.
Wow, that was dark. No I didn’t cut myself then, I haven’t cut myself since I was 15 and on a high dosage of Prozac. Back then, emotions were impossible, and unsafe to navigate. So trying to navigate them for the first time in my late 20s was torturous. But as painful as it was, it was also deeply therapeutic to finally sit with those harsh realizations from my past. To acknowledge how physical pain had once felt safer than emotional pain.
Allowing myself to explore those old thoughts—not to act on them, but to witness them—helped me understand just how badly I wanted to avoid those painful emotions. I wanted control. I wanted relief. And yet… I stayed. I sat with the discomfort. With the rage that felt safer than sadness. With the shame that told me feeling pain meant I was weak. I sat with all of it, even when I hated being human for feeling so much.
That was the beginning. The first real step toward learning to accept the full spectrum of emotion—the messiness, the depth, the vulnerability. Because feeling it all, even when it’s hard, is what makes us human
