The utility of pain

I don't know why I have such a dark perspective behind my lucid eyes. I am building something that is meant to be a light for lost souls, and yet I carry a way of thinking that turns against me without permission, and it attacks most when everything is going well. It hurts when I cannot shut them out, and it is almost funny that I really am my own worst enemy. Life is going beautifully right now, and some days I cannot see it.

I will always go backwards to old photos, past memories, nostalgia, just to feel okay. I keep reminiscing about people I know I will never reach out to again, because it feels better knowing it has ended. Why? So the pain is allowed to be real. And why hold on to pain at all? I think part of me believes it helps me, because my writing has come from those places and it has reached people.

And yet I tell you the opposite. I tell you that going back over the past only keeps the wound open. I tell you to let it go, to stop letting one old event decide who you are. I tell you all of this, and I mean every word. And I do exactly what I tell you not to do.

That is the confession. Now here is the question I keep circling back to: what is the utility of being able to think this way?

It allows me to write about it. It lets me understand people who live with depression day after day, because I have sat where they sit, behind my own eyes, watching my own thoughts attack my integrity and my confidence. I love people, and it breaks my heart to see the darkness in their eyes when their own thoughts wage war on everything they are. So many of us turn to pleasure to numb it, me included, because numb is easier than doing the things that matter. It is not easy, and I will not pretend it is.

That is what the darkness gives me. Not destruction, but sight. And what I see when I look outward is how few of us have a kind relationship with ourselves, and how much sadness grows from that.

How do we help people who are trapped in their own heads? I think it starts with love, which is the simplest and most terrifying act available to a human being. I try to smile at strangers where I can, because I cannot hide it anymore: I love people, even how dumb and stubborn we can be. And here is the strange part. That love comes easily for a stranger on the street. It is the man behind my own eyes I keep at war.

What can you do today with whatever is sitting on your chest? Ask it the question I had to ask mine: what are you for? Maybe it gave you something, like sight, softness, or the words for someone else's night. If it has already given you what it had to give, you are allowed to put it down. Not by pretending it did not happen, but by letting yourself be okay in what is real to you right now: your life.

For a long time I believed that was why I had to carry the pain, that the writing needed the wound. But I'm learning I don't have to stay in the pain to write, and that reaching out, to someone in my life now rather than someone in an old photo, is worth it. The sight stays even when I set the weight down. That is the utility. I accept where I am now rather than questioning why I am here, and perhaps that is the only shift that ever needed to happen.