Life can be filled with many ups and downs. It can also be filled with an abundance of trials and tribulations. And while it can encompass a lot of good days, there are also the not so good ones too. In all of this, people will often look for an escape from experiencing those times when life seems a little under the rainbow. I should know, I’ve sought out many of them.
I don’t believe that finding an escape from reality for a short period of time is necessarily a bad thing if it’s a healthy one. Unfortunately for most of my life I engaged in too many of the ones that would be deemed unhealthy and I rarely would emerge out of them. I escaped from the craziness in my alcoholic family by living in a total fantasy world. I escaped next into an alcohol and drug addicted world when I couldn’t face my sexuality issues. After I came out of the closet, I chose to escape again into a sex and love addicted world because of many of my glaring insecurities. And over those years, I even sought other unhealthy escapes from the ones I was already living in. It’s kind of crazy when I think about it now on how I was trying to escape from one of the other unhealthy escapes I was already doing with something else just as unhealthy. Eventually I began to see that my life had just became a series of escaping life itself.
While life does need at times it’s moments to retreat, recuperate, and pamper oneself, it’s just as important to experience reality too. The truth in my life is that I never did want to experience what was going on in and around me. I didn’t want to face the fact I had very sick parents growing up. I didn’t want to face the fact I was molested at a young age by a peer outside my family. I didn’t want to face the fact I was gay. I didn’t want to face the fact I didn’t like the career paths I chose. I didn’t want to face the fact I didn’t like many of the people I dated and ended up in relationships with. And ultimately, I really just didn’t want to face the fact I didn’t like me! So I found escapes that kept me from walking through any of my insecurities and only ended up creating more of them as the years went on. Getting drunk, high, over smoking, chronic gambling, intensive shopping, over traveling, and overeating, were just some of the many ways I tried to unhealthily escape living life. In each of those, the escape worked for a period of time and the demons remained suppressed, but eventually, they always came back and reared their ugly heads. The point is they were never meant to be suppressed. They were not meant to be run from. And they weren’t meant to be hidden from either. What was always meant for me to do, was to face them head-on. To do that for anyone is hard work, but worth it because once one does face a fear and overcomes it, there is no need to try to find an escape from it anymore.
Over the past year in my life with God helping me now, I have done my best to face many deep-seated fears that have plagued most of my life. The more that I have continued to face them, the healthier I have become and the less I have felt the urge to go back into any of those former unhealthy escapes. Instead, I have been finding that while my mind and body may still desire outlets to tune out for a few hours from all the hard work I’m doing to spiritually grow, that I am much more able now to choose healthier ones. I have found things such as taking a hot bubble filled bath, going to a movie on my own, working on a puzzle, reading a good book, taking a walk on the beach, or going for a drive with no specific destination, can each provide me with the necessary few hours of much needed comfort. The best thing about it is that when I’m done with any of them, I find I am ready to tackle even more of those fears and worries.
The bottom line is that I don’t believe I was ever meant to fully escape from all those things that have scared me throughout most of my life. Instead, I’ve learned that I was always meant to grow by facing them directly. I know now that as I do face them and continue to grow along spiritual lines, that it’s still important for me to find those temporary escapes. The key today is to find ones that are healthy and support my path in healing. And as I partake in any of them, I always remind myself that life is worth being fully lived and any healthy escape is solely for the purpose of giving myself that much needed break for all the hard work I continue to do to grow closer to God.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
