Peace in suffering

I listened to a podcast the other day about suffering. I am working at balancing my reading with my required continuing education credits I need for the year so I chose The Science of Suffering and Moving Forward- The pandemic and beyond. The presenters are a husband-and-wife duo studying the effects of suffering on all of us during our most difficult times. Whether a shared experience like the one we experienced during the earliest parts of the pandemic or the individual experience we have with a personal loss. According to the presenters Daryl and Sara Van Tongeren, some suffering is so profound, so violating, or so dogged that it fundamentally changes people in indelible ways. That statement sat with me long after hearing this. So much suffering comes from our expectations and what comes of those expectations not working out how we wanted them. They go on to say that the more we acknowledge our pain, derive meaning in our suffering we can still choose a life with hope.

I have been struggling lately. So much of my life feels uncertain and that has been a space that I have not lived in for most of my adult life. Even in some of my more challenging years, I kept busy, took on new projects, worked multiples jobs, even drowned myself in unhealthy behaviors to bridge the gap between where I was and all the uncertainty that life was offering me. It truly took me almost 40 years to learn to slow down, appreciate the stillness, and recognize that immersion in a million things only masked what I was feeling it didn’t help me work through it. Only in the last 6 months have I struck a self-care routine that truly is focused on my growth, my self-awareness, and my commitment to never find myself so lost again. I was lost for a long-time. Honestly, it took the destruction of so much to wake me up to the fact that I really needed help and that without a dedicated focus to self, I would repeat the destruction over and over again.

Something I recently learned is that there is no cure for your past experiences. Sure, we can do the hard work of making changes, of not letting our past patterns and behavior own our lives or dictate how we show up in relation to another human being but we can’t change what happened to us. We can’t erase our learned coping behaviors nor can we erase the things that make us feel insecure, unsafe, etc. What does happen is that we develop a much higher sense of self-awareness to know what our triggers are and work to heal those wounded parts. In context of relationship, means being open and vulnerable with your partner when you are feeling triggered and working with them to acknowledge it, regulating yourself and remembering that they are not your past experiences. I really believed that changing others was how to navigate my anxiety when in reality it was changing myself that was necessary to emotionally regulate myself. To heal those broken, sharp edges that make up my humanity.

There is something brewing in my energetic field these days. I am restless, my dreams are vivid, and I feel a change is coming. a deep rooted change that after all the change I’ve had seems extremely scary. Suffering has kept me firmly planted for a long time. I have felt a tremendous amount of loss and grief in conjunction with the pandemic, the end of two relationships, and the very challenging self-work journey I have been on. Grief has been at the forefront of my heart and mind and what I realized about myself is that I have remained hopeful. I truly have felt that despite all the suffering there has also been a ton of beauty, growth, and healing that has happened, so hope remains. I had set expectations for myself that I could never be happy again. That I had lost my opportunity to be happy when my relationship ended and what I have realized is that suffering doesn’t negate the feeling of happiness unless you let it and I let it for a very long time. I didn’t know what to do without her presence in my life. I still worry if I will ever be truly happy. I feel a void some days and I no longer do just anything to fill it. I am sitting with it sorting out what it actually represents. I fill it with an abundance of knowledge, self-compassion, and as of the last month and a half, a daily self-care routine. I fill it with connection to myself and others. I do falter sometimes. I get lost in my head and I drift back into my grief and I sit there until I crawl back out sometimes stronger, sometimes needing a little more time and sometimes feeling a little more relief.

For a long time, I believed the worst of myself. I truly lost my identity. I was a monster, a harmful, hurtful, human unworthy of love. I felt inadequate in so many areas and if I am being honest, I was not showing up in any role I held at the time. I was not effectively showing up for my kids, my family, my friends, my partner, my work, all of it was suffering. The arrogant, multi-tasker was unable to be human because I was so deeply stuck in my head, my anxiety, my need. All of it was to regulate myself, others be damned. The unfortunate reality is that resulted in a lot of loss. I don’t think anyone will ever understand the deep-rooted pain that has been circulating through me. Some days have been excruciating, days where my only recourse was dissociating. Completely disconnecting from myself to move through to the next day. Doing anything and everything I could to forget. Some days it feels like the only thing I feel is despair. And other days I feel like I am on top of the world. As I navigate those fluctuations, I am taking note of how I am feeling and how I am showing myself compassion. And I do this each and every day. I do hope that one day I am able to move into the next chapter of my life but for now I am sitting here living one day at a time.