You were in my dream last night.
You looked good, but you had some scars…
Over the weekend I got the above text from a sober buddy of mine. It came out of the blue, and when I read it I immediately teared up. A wave of a thousand emotions emerged from such few words. I felt seen for what felt like the first time in my life.
I’ve spent the last few years “working on myself”. I got sober, dove into all types of physical training, completely changed my diet, studied countless books of philosophy and psychology, completed a few years of therapy and addressed deep trauma. I did all the things any good student of personal development “should” do. A few years into that I found myself in more pain and suffering than I’d ever been in, leading me to the obvious question - How did this happen?
I came to that place towards the latter half of last year. Truth is, the years before that weren’t much better. I had been suffering acutely for quite some time. I was supposed to be a shining light of sobriety, a pillar of the community, but inside I was falling apart. Nothing made sense. Everything was supposed to fall into place, but my relationships were still filled with torment, pain and chaos. I had begun to experience the same level of helplessness and desperation I had felt in the months leading up to sobriety. It was a living hell.
What I didn’t understand was this very simple fact: like physical scars, emotional scars live with us forever. With enough work we can make the bleeding stop - we can stitch the wound - but their mark, their memory and their meaning remain with us until the grave. We can’t outrun them, and no one can relieve us of them. They are ours to keep - the difference becomes what we do with them.
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Our scars make us who we are. I’ve seen that firsthand - pain has brought to more extraordinary places than pleasure ever could. When I look back on my life, I realize that it’s my scars that have fueled the the creative spirit within me. It’s my scars that never let me settle, that never let me be content, that never let me quit. For some this may sound negative, but for me this is the greatest blessing I could have asked for.
My restless soul searches for repose, and my scars will help me find it.
OUR EXPERIENCE CAN BENEFIT OTHERS.