I recently got sober from everything. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But it has been hard in a layered way. Not in one great battle like The Lord of The Rings, but more like a rising out of the depths to a surface I haven’t seen in decades.
A lot of me doesn’t want to get sober, even though I know how damaging my addictions have been. I believe that if I get sober my life will have many more opportunities to be happy and successful.
That’s the light side of sobriety. But at this moment I am experiencing the dark side of sobriety.
I am very afraid. Not of the world or consequences or of people, but of feeling again.
For my entire adult life, I have numbed myself. I thought my pain was too much to feel. So, I sought out things to numb my agony. And it worked.
But the problem with numbing your pain is that it doesn’t just numb the bad, it numbs the good as well. Joy, happiness and connection gets stripped away and made bleak and ragged. Like dunking yourself in a pool of acid to scratch an itch, it works in the immediate but ultimately destroys you for a time.
I didn’t want to write this. I wanted to bottle it up like I always have and bury it. But I know that doesn’t work. It never has.
So, if burying it doesn’t work, what am I left with.
I must feel again.
I must face the pain and embrace it in all its wretchedness. If there is anything I have learned in my years in therapy, running from my problems doesn’t work.
I have been procrastinating from my pain. Because I knew when I did come to pay that toll, it wouldn’t be pleasant.
If I could stay addicted and still be successful, I probably would have never gotten sober. But the cost of addiction has become too high.
I don’t know what is on the other side of this journey. But I hope I will find a measure of peace.
Only one way to find out.
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