Nobody enjoys going through pain. No one likes to be heartbroken. Have you ever heard someone say "I just want to be in pain again"? Of course not. No one wants to hurt. Sometimes your pain can feel insignificant to the people around you. However, your pain is important because it is yours.
I've been batting around the idea of horizons lately. A horizon is the farthest point at which you can see. When you're going through pain often times your horizon is set directly in front of where you are right in that moment. Right in that pain, the kind that makes you want to sleep all day and night. It is the kind of pain in which you feel like your world stops turning but everyone else's doesn't. The kind of pain that makes you lose your appetite. That is as far as you can see. You can't see how much this pain is going to help you grow and you can't see past the pain.
Pain has a way of making you forget what life was like when it wasn't there. And this isn't the kind of pain that is at the forefront of your mind for a little while. This is the kind of pain that stays back, it lingers like a pulled muscle. It's the kind of thing that just never seems to go away. You might forget about it for a little bit, but of course, it's still there. Your pain is important. You may forget about it for a moment and the whole world will think that you are fine and that you have moved on but you haven't, and I know it feels like you never will. From what I've been told, you will although I can not confidently say that for sure.
I can't tell you yet what comes after your pain, but I can tell you that it matters. I can tell you that it is not invalid. I can tell you that I know what your timeline is feeling like right now. It was hard and then it got easier and then all of a sudden it got harder again and then harder and harder and harder. I know that it seems like this could not possibly get worse and then tomorrow you wake up and it is. I know you wish that you could throw you hands up in the air, give up all responsibility, and spend the rest of your life laying in bed, watching Netflix and eating Ben & Jerry's. And nothing anyone says or does is going to make it any better. And you keep lying to everyone and saying that you are okay but you aren't. And you're not saying it for them you are saying it for you because somebody told you that maybe just maybe if you lie to yourself long enough about being alright then maybe one day you will be.
I know.
Trust me, I know. I know that you feel like this pain is so great that maybe one day it is just going to kill you. But I can tell you that it won't. I can tell you that you will survive. Even if all you are doing is surviving I promise that you will survive.
Audre Lorde said "Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. Pain will always either change or stop. Always. The confidence that it will change is what makes bearing it possible. So pain is fluid. It is only when you conceive of it as something static that it is unbearable".
So we have to go and try. We have to have a horizon past our pain and we cannot let it become unbearable. Have confidence that this pain will either change or stop. Always.
