A Pain You Cherish

I heard someone ask a profound question on a podcast today. The question was …

“What is a pain you cherish?”

You probably don’t think of a physical pain. Rather, you think of an emotional pain.

Because that’s the pain that hurts the most.

For me, it’s obvious. I cherish my addiction.

It’s strange, because out of all the terrible places that my active addiction brought me, the lowest point in my life was was actually after I got sober.

I was about 6 months into my sobriety and my life was not going well. I managed to get a job selling advertisements in a magazine and I was fired after 2 weeks. The manager gave me $150 to help me out and sent me on my way. I remember walking back to the halfway house I was staying at. It was scorching heat and I had no money, no food, and was too proud to ask my parents for help.

Getting through the first 90 days my sobriety was brutal. I swear to you, I was in withdrawal for 3 months straight. I would sweat through my bed every night. I threw up constantly. I still don’t understand why I was sick for as long as I was. I thought I was dying. They say opiate withdrawal can’t kill you, but I sure felt like it was killing me.

And to get through all of that only to find myself in a hopeless situation almost broke my spirit. I didn’t see a reason to keep going. I did what they told me to do. I stayed sober, I went to meetings, I puked in the toilet every night and suffered through it with a blind belief that things would get better.

Yet here I was, stuck in the blistering heat with no money and no food and nowhere to go. I can look at it objectively and say “yeah, but you still had a bed to sleep in, and some people who were supporting you.”

That’s all true. Like I said, it wasn’t the worst moment in my life. But for whatever reason, that walk down Linton Ave was the worst I’ve ever felt about myself in my life.

I felt pathetic and worthless. I was very under weight and if it weren’t for my cousin saving my ass, I would have been on the street.

It hurt so bad. Even thinking about it now makes me emotional.

That’s the pain I cherish the most.

I wish I could take that moment and crystalize it into a physical manifestation. I would turn it into a trophy and put it on my desk. I would pray to it every night.

That was the worst moment of my life. And that was the best moment of my life.

It was the closest I ever came to giving up. But since I got through that walk down Linton, I can get through anything.