beautiful pain

When I stopped drinking for a couple of years - I think from 2016 - 2018 - I felt heaps better not long after stopping. And when I worked out a plan with the help of my new doctor in 2014, and got on the right medication, it had a huge effect. Between 2010 and 2014 was like non-stop hard struggle. I don't know exactly what caused that episode, but I remember the day it started. It was really like being in some kind of severe accident even though nothing physically like that happened. But something in my brain broke really badly and I was in pain, and that went on and on for years - about 3.5 years, and then I felt such sweet relief around the middle of 2014. 

This time though, with stopping drinking last year and tapering off valium, there hasn't been a time of relief. It seems endless. I haven't noticed the benefits of not drinking, although the benefits are surely there, and likewise with all of my daily goals and the positive habits I've cultivated...I know that they are having an affect. But there hasn't been a weight lifted or a respite from the need to fight every day and to go through mental pain all the time. 

Especially lately, as I head into the third year of 'this' (whatever it is I'm going through) I really feel like I'm permanently damaged. I'm not coming back from this. Maybe I'm too old now, and all the mental health struggles and nameless, undefinable problems - things wrong with me, unaddressed trauma, has undone me. 

But I have a consolation, and it's something awesome. 2022 was absolutely a turning point in my life. The biggest turning point in my whole life. There were a lot of firsts last year but the basic change was that I went from my daily goals being what I try to do, to them being what I do, regardless of how I feel, regardless of whether doing them helps. 

I'm very conscious that there is a new me and there is an old me, and when I feel like I'm being damaged and pushed out of shape and crushed, that's the old me dying and the new me being born. It took pain to push me into my new life of achieving my daily goals. It seemed like there was no answer or hope and that the suffering was endless, but I came to understand that achieving my daily goals was a way out - a way forward, and because there was no other way, I tried it.