I spent years trying not to feel.
Not just pain. Joy, too. Longing. Grief. Love. Wonder. The whole unruly mess of being human.
I learned early that some feelings seemed too dangerous to touch. Trauma teaches you that. Addiction reinforces it. Before I ever put a needle in my arm, I was already looking for a way out of myself. The drugs came later. They were simply a more efficient escape route.
We live in a culture obsessed with comfort. We medicate, distract, scroll, consume, and perform. Anything to avoid sitting quietly in the company of our own hearts. We call it self-care. Often it’s just self-avoidance.
But pain is stubborn. It follows us into every room.
I’ve learned that healing isn’t the absence of pain. Healing is the willingness to carry it honestly.
The old wounds of childhood didn’t disappear because I ignored them. The grief of lost years didn’t vanish because I stayed busy. The ache of loving people deeply didn’t lessen because I pretended not to need them.
Pain kept showing up like a messenger knocking on a locked door.
And eventually I realized something: pain wasn’t my enemy. It was trying to tell me the truth.
The truth that something mattered.
The truth that something had been lost.
The truth that I was still alive.
Love hurts because love requires us to stay awake. To remain tender in a world that rewards numbness. To risk disappointment, rejection, and heartbreak without closing our hearts in self-defense.
There is no great love without great vulnerability. And there is no vulnerability without the possibility of pain.
The strange thing is that the pain we run from often becomes the thing that controls us. The pain we face becomes the thing that transforms us.
As a mother, I see this in my children. They cry freely. They laugh freely. They haven’t yet learned the adult art of amputating pieces of themselves to appear strong.
Perhaps maturity isn’t learning to feel less.
Perhaps it’s learning how to carry more.
To carry grief without bitterness.
To carry sorrow without despair.
To carry love without demanding guarantees.
To carry our stories without being crushed beneath them.
The wounds we refuse to acknowledge become prisons. The wounds we bring into the light can become doors.
Pain is not proof that something has gone wrong.
Sometimes pain is proof that something precious is trying to come back to life.
B🤍
Leave a Reply