Category: Healing From Chronic Pain And Illness

A full day of rest. That’s what my new sponsor in 12 Step recovery asked me to begin doing immediately on a weekly basis. Of course, I had to qualify what that meant, because my brain is so geared towards constantly having to be doing something.

There really isn’t ever a day in my life where I simply relax and kick back, or referred better in today’s modern terms as set aside for, “Netflix and Chill.” I really struggle simply being still. Instead, I’m typically driven to a life of doing. Whether it is a volunteer opportunity, yard work, some other recovery work, cleaning, helping people over the phone, writing for this blog, or something else, I keep myself quite busy and rarely do I ever take a full day to do nothing except pamper myself. While I may take a few hours here and there for that in any given day, the idea of taking a full day to pamper myself has always felt like such a selfish action.

Sadly, I know where this behavior began and I also know where this behavior grew even worse as well. It began with parents reinforcing anti-lazy messages, along with the notion that I can always do more and try harder. Later in life, once I truly found myself on the path of 12 Step recovery, I felt like I needed to prove to God I wasn’t going to be selfish anymore given all the years I had focused on my addictions and meeting only my needs, wants, and desires. So, I began pushing myself to my limits and sometimes even beyond them on many days where things like sitting back and spending a day napping, watching tv, eating some food, playing games, and ultimately focusing on just me felt wrong. Wrong because my brain would tell me that I should be out there helping another or at least at the very minimum doing something around the house that needs to get done. By consistently living this way, my batteries often get depleted, never fully having a chance to recharge.

I don’t know where it was said that Sunday should be a day of rest, was it Biblically? I can’t remember. But truly, every single week, I have avoided taking even one of those for myself to rest. I don’t think God wants me to be this way, draining myself like I have, feeling so very worn-out, especially with my ongoing health issues that exacerbate my exhaustion. It’s ironic because 12 Step recovery often touts a message that when you’re not feeling great about yourself, you should be out there helping another suffering soul, yet what I’m realizing now is that if I keep avoiding taking care of me in the process of doing that, I’ll have no energy to help those suffering souls.

So, I’ve decided I’m going to start taking Sundays for myself for the unforeseeable future. Unless there’s some emergency I need to attend to, I’m going to begin pampering myself on each Sunday. That means no volunteer work, no meetings, no pushing myself, no having to do anything, other than relax. Because, ultimately, I need it, and really, I deserve a full day of rest, as do we all.

While that may seem selfish to my brain that got programmed to believe that so erroneously long ago, I realize to counter-program that, I need to start taking those Sundays for myself as a reminder for three things. One, it’s important to have time to recharge my batteries. Two, it’s important that for as much as I take care of helping others, it’s important to take care of helping me too. And lastly, three, that remaining still and doing nothing is often the very moment when our Higher Power finally gets a chance to get a person’s attention like me, who’s always busily doing instead of simply being.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

It’s pretty easy to try to blame the source of one’s pain on those closest to you or on things around you. For as long as I’ve been dealing with the difficult health issues I have, I’ve occasionally and regrettably lashed out at my partner and others closest to my heart, and even with the region I’m currently living in too. Most recently, in the midst of doing this behavior, I opted to go visit a close high school friend named Karen whose family lives in Austin, Texas, solely in the hopes that my health might improve drastically by getting away from Toledo, the Midwest, and my partner. It was pretty obvious in the first 24 hours away though that what’s been going on within me has nothing to do with anyone or anything but me.

While at times my stress levels may indeed be higher due to where I live or tensions with my partner, I accept now that neither are major contributors to any of my health issues. For as much as alcohol or drugs or sex or love or any of the other things I once addictively fell prey to numbed various parts of my psyche that I didn’t like about myself, a small vacation taken many miles away merely did the same as well.

On some level, I’m actually thankful to discover this, as it quickly eliminated the many projections my ego has been giving me lately, especially during these COVID times. The saying “You are wherever you go” feels so apropos right about now with that stark realization. While my ego truly wanted to go to Austin and suddenly experience miraculous levels of relief and healing, that didn’t happen, thus crushing my ego’s last ditched effort to remain in control.

The reality I see now is that my health and healing really is out of my control. I’ve done the very best I can over the years to heal myself by desperately seeking answers and working so very hard to find the source of all my pain. Along the way I’ve attempted to fix all the brokenness and unhealthiness from my past and still have come up short in the physical healing department. Ultimately, I accept now it really is in God’s hands and maybe always was. I just needed to give my ego a last hurrah by going on this trip alone so it could see the ultimate truth.

So, while I’m blessed to have been a guest in Karen’s home for a few days in Austin and did experience some wonderful times, the biggest blessing quite possibly received on this trip was the crushing blow given to my ego when its final attempt to try to fix me failed. I see now the only thing that’s going to fix me is to keep trusting in God, as it’s God and not my ego that delivered me from a life of addiction hell, and it’s God who will do the same with my health when the time is right.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

I always try to write with the intention to inspire others by making myself fully transparent to the masses, sometimes even painfully so at my expense. As I write this on my travels back from a long-planned and somewhat COVID-delayed summer vacation to Mackinaw Island and the Upper Peninsula, I’m struggling to find that and hope by the end I can.

Three years ago, my partner Chris gave me an envelope for my birthday on June 11^th. In it was a heart-felt letter wishing me a truly wonderful birthday, a promise to take me on an all-expenses paid trip to Mackinaw Island and the surrounding vicinity, including room, transportation, and meals, and a map of the area. Sadly, my health issues kept getting in the way of that from ever coming to fruition with each passing year. But when 2020 arrived, I felt tremendously better, mind, body, and soul. I was getting more physically active and so with renewed vigor and excitement for life, I finally opted to redeem Chris’s vacation coupon that had sat on my desk for over 1000 days gathering dust.

We were going to take an extended Memorial Day weekend trip to St. Ignace, Michigan, where once there, we would stay in a waterfront room at a Best Western resort. From there our plan was to spend a day up in Sault Saint Marie to see the Soo locks and another over on Mackinaw Island. The two other days planned away were going to either be chill days at the outdoor pool and hot tub or local travel to other touristy type of things.

Then COVID hit in early March and began to expand quickly. The health improvement I had been experiencing rapidly disappeared leaving me wondering if the trip should be postponed again, as trying to go on vacation when my health issues are seriously problematic is as much fun as sitting in a car on a 100-degree day with no air conditioning, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic moving at 5mph.

But, I kept the faith and left the trip booked. That is, until hotel management informed us they might not be open by Memorial Day and even if they were somehow, that restaurants and attractions probably wouldn’t be yet. In light of that, we made the frustrating decision to postpone to the last weekend of August with the hope that things would be far better by then, both with my health and with COVID. I spent the summer doing everything I could with the former. I exercised more, got out more, helped others more, and even took a number of short trips where walking was involved, and somehow all if it helped me enough to feel ready for the trip again. As for the latter, I was ecstatic to see how Michigan’s number of cases drastically decreased by the time August arrived and our trip mere weeks away.

On the day we were to leave, August 26^th, we both were excited. I spent a few hours in the early AM cleaning up the yard and ponds, watering, and getting everything done outside, while Chris cleaned up the inside, so our housesitter didn’t have to worry about it. As we put our final things in Chris’s car prior to departure, a huge windstorm swept in and blew a bunch of debris back into all the places I had just cleaned up. Immediate annoyance set in for my OCD self. Was this an ominous warning of more of what was to come? My partner convinced me it wasn’t and helped me to let it go as we pulled out of the driveway and headed northwards.

I really want to say that everything just kept getting better from there, that loads of stress came off my back, that I felt better on every level with each passing mile, and how amazing the trip ended up being overall. While I do have gratitude for some of the things I saw and experienced, which will be covered in the next Grateful Heart Monday entry, everything felt more upside down than right side up the entire time we were away. First it was with a number of health issues returning I hadn’t seen in years. Next came a drastic increase in my partner’s back pain, along with his negativity surrounding it, that prevented him from doing much of anything that involved walking. That was followed by someone on a balcony near us constantly smoking weed that made it next to impossible to enjoy the scenic views. The weather turned unseasonably cool, cloudy, and rainy after that. And finally, it all came to a head with constant bickering between Chris and I. After four days of this and totally vexing our friends who had met us up there, we decided to cut our losses and head home a full day early.

I know I didn’t go into much intricate detail of how off this vacation really was for Chris and I, but I didn’t think it would be of much benefit to dwell on those parts. What I think is more important to focus on is the reality that life sometimes doesn’t go anywhere near the direction we’d hope for. I’ve been experiencing this for well over a decade now no matter how hard I try, and have had to accept that sometimes the direction of our sails isn’t up to us. And sometimes our boat doesn’t feel like it has any sails at all and has left us stranded in the middle of nowhere, not moving at all. I find when those times happen, when trips like this one occur, when a vacation feels more like hell than heaven, where we can’t seem to adjust our sails into any positive direction, that all we can do is turn it over to God, and trust we’re still being guided, even when it feels like we’re not.

What’s the alternative? To bitch and complain? We did enough of that in the midst of all the sorrow and frustration during our vacation and it only made things feel far worse. So, I leave this where I started it, with disappointment and sadness, but also with hope and faith, that there will be other vacations, better days of health, more intimate moments to share with Chris, and brighter days with God to come. And maybe, just maybe, that perfect rainbow we saw literally a few hundred feet from our balcony right after we made the decision to leave early was a sign from God reminding us of that…

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson