Pain

Everyone is dealing with pain in one form or another. I'm not talking about physical pain, no, I'm talking about the psychological and emotional baggage that we all carry. In this entry I'm going to go into depth on the pain that I deal with and the roots of where it comes from. The first experience I ever had with pain was with the death of my father when I was a child. I was forced to come to terms with the concept of mortality at a very young age because of it and it was the central event that shaped my early life. Throughout my childhood I was angry, I was sad, I was in a state of consistent turmoil. I felt that I was robbed of someone that should have been a central figure in my life and even though I had extensive therapy, I was still consumed with a tempest of negative emotions and pain because of it. The death of someone so important in ones life is something that you never completely recover from, I still haven't recovered from it to this day, but I still somehow find the strength to keep going despite of it. During my teenage years I came to realize the second source of pain in my life. That source was my depression, my social anxiety, and my reluctance to make connections with others. It was in my adolescence that I was first diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and first started going into treatment for it. I went into therapy and I started taking anti depressants, but still the inner anguish in my mind persisted. Depression is a kind of pain that I have come to understand will never truly go away. It's something that I will have to deal with every day for the rest of my life. When I started college I was briefly in a state of mind where I was feeling the best, but the inner pain I was dealing with came to a crescendo as I became an upper classman. My senior year I got my own apartment in which I lived in by myself which was probably when things got the darkest up to that point. I lost touch with all of the friends I made and went into a reclusive state. I stopped taking my anti depressants, thinking I was well enough to feel okay on my own, but throughout the half semester I was living there, things got progressively worse. I picked up the habit of drinking to excess in order to numb the pain, which, in retrospect, was the absolute worst way to deal with the struggles I was having. Not only did I lose touch with the people I cared about, my performance in school suffered, and I began to neglect taking care of myself physically. If my mother hadn't intervened, I'm not sure if I would have recovered from the state I was in. Despite the pain I was feeling, I somehow managed to get through school and obtain my degree. After college things were once again going okay for a bit, but it was about a year and a half after graduation that the pain became the worst it had ever been up to that point. One large source of my pain was the death of my grandfather. Throughout my life, he filled the role of a strong male role model that was left empty with the absence of my biological father. His death was so sudden and to be honest, I'm still trying to deal with it. One particularly unhealthy path that I took was trying to make sure the pain everyone else was feeling was alleviated while avoiding dealing with my own pain. It's just been in recent months that I've been processing his passing myself. As of last week, like I said, the pain reached the highest it had been up to this point and I almost pulled the plug on everything. Obviously I didn't do that, but I'm currently still experiencing pain and trying my best to deal with it. While I was in the hospital, I talked with my older brother when he visited me, and he showed me that so many others were dealing with pain similar to how I was, and I came to an important realization. That realization is that pain is just a part of life, however, it's up to us how we choose to combat it.