There have been many pain-filled days in the past six months or so where my ego has tried to convince me that relapsing into any one of my former addictions would bring me some much-needed relief. While I’m sure doing so would help me become numb to the pain for a period of time, I know the only thing it’s ever done for me in the long run is make me feel a sense of being uncomfortably comfortable all the time.
Pain sucks, to put it bluntly. I mean who really wants to feel pain anyway? I sure didn’t for all those years I sought one addiction after another and various people, places, and things to help me hide from ever facing it. But doing so eventually just led me to having this constant feeling like I was uncomfortable in my own skin, that something was really off inside me. And the longer I remained uncomfortable in my own skin, continuing to look for things externally to keep numbing any pain I felt inside, the more I grew comfortable living out my life that way. This is precisely the reason why I ended up remaining in a constant state of feeling uncomfortably comfortable for over several decades.
Until I became willing to go through the pain, that feeling never went away. Instead, I’d awake every morning and experience the tip of my pain iceberg and would immediately scramble to find something to start numbing myself from it. I was always restless, irritable and discontent with everyone and everything because of it. In fact, it was quite easy for me to get into a fit about anything. The truth is I was so scared of feeling the pain I kept suppressing inside. But yet I was also just as much scared of staying uncomfortably comfortable for the rest of my life as well.
After my mother passed away about ten years ago though, something inside me began to shift. The amount of pain I was trying to suppress at that point was too great, which is why I went off to a silent retreat to finally begin facing it. Since then, I’ve been on a path that has caused me to go deeper and deeper within to find the ultimate source of that pain. As the years passed, all those layers of it that I pushed down would rear their ugly heads. And each time they did, my ego would attempt to convince me to run back to that state of being numb and uncomfortably comfortable. Sometimes I did, but more often I didn’t, until three years ago, when I stopped giving into them at all.
Now I’m facing the most difficult of pain I’ve ever faced and it’s harder than anything I could have ever imagined. I’m at the true source of my pain now, the one I believe led me down that uncomfortably comfortable path all those years ago. My ego is constantly screaming at me to do anything that will take the edge off of what I’ve been feeling lately. But I haven’t done anything but continue to feel this pain, because I’m convinced the source of it is that I stopped believing in God long ago. And when I did, I started looking outside of myself for one thing after another to bring me comfort, thinking God could never give me that.
So as I sit here and type these words, enduring the greatest pain I think I’ve ever faced in my entire life, I’m not feeling uncomfortably comfortable anymore because I’m not trying to escape from it either. Instead, I’m doing my absolute best to keep my faith in God that in going through this pain, I’ll be led to a much deeper, richer, and fuller life, one where I won’t have the desire to numb myself from living it ever again…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson