Hold on.. It's going to be alright in the end =)

Sometimes I get hung up on how lonely and stuck between a rock and a hard place I feel, and I end up wasting precious time and energy fighting an uphill battle with the recurring depression that I have not been able to shake since childhood.


Don't get me wrong: we all have the power to overcome even the most difficult of circumstances.



"But that's easier said than done!!" you say..
 
You are absolutely right. It is. It takes holding on in the face of adversity to achieve that, which is anything but easy to do when adversity is in your face, relentlessly staring you down.

I mean, you can tell a person hanging on to the edge of the cliff to "Just keep hanging on! Hopefully someone that can help you will arrive in time!!", but that encouragement doesn't make the reality of doing so any easier for them. Yet, the consequences of letting go are so severe that letting go is not an option for the cliff dangler. Adrenaline kicks in to fuel the hard work needed to oppose gravity from that height, which keeps those fingers griping the edge of the ground with the strength of their life.

It's easy to hold on when your life is at stake, but what about when your life is at stake in a way that isn't as readily apparent as hanging from the side of a cliff? What about when the cliff is in your mind?


A friend of mine struggled with addiction for years, and although he seemed to have been winning the battle, he ended up losing it permanently almost a year ago. He should have held on and kept working at pulling himself up onto solid ground, but for whatever reason, he didn't.


A bunch of unexpected, adverse and overwhelming life circumstances happened in a very short time frame (the trigger), which likely led to his decision to move in with "friends" whose lives were still intertwined with the lifestyle he was trying to leave behind. Now to be fair, these "friends" didn't force him to relapse, but they also didn't help him abstain either. With the first drink they offered him, he began letting go, one finger at a time, until the last finger keeping him attached to the edge of his mind's cliff lost its grip for good.

His friends found him early one Sunday morning in late May of last year, frozen in his lifeless state with a look on his face that makes me cry to think he couldn't even find peace in death. He died of a heroin overdose, and though he had been clean for 5 years before moving in with his "friends", he did not understand the importance of people, places and things in our lives. The people that we choose to surround ourselves with, the places that we go in our free time and the things that we do with our time all have the ability to either help lift us up or pull us down. I'm sorry you had to learn such a permanent lesson. Rip Danny. :(

I may not be struggling with heroin addiction, but I can empathize deeply with the demons my friend was battling within himself. It is not easy to overcome something as powerful as addiction, and it is even more difficult when you can't escape from the darkness that plagues your own mind long after the drugs have left your system. I don't want to end up like him. I don't want to cheat myself out of a future, and the reality is, you can waste it just as easily without ever doing drugs. I can sit here in a hole within myself and let my inner light escape from my soul one ray at a time, but if I do that, then this journey will have been in vain. Just like his was.  

This world seems to be falling apart, just like the lives of so many I know, but we must never forget that it is part of a larger cycle, within an infinitely bigger picture. This, too, shall pass, and when it does, new growth will follow.

Things get broken down in order to build up new things. We see it in muscle formation as much as we do in forest fires. We even see it in people. Not everyone who walks the path of addiction succumbs to it; some of us are able to find the strength within ourselves to get the help that we need in order to overcome our demons and grow stronger as a result of it all. Yet, not everyone can, and not everyone wants to, overcome their disease of addiction. Some people seem to find happiness rotting in the self-inflicted decay of their own ruins. Or maybe they are in too much pain to realize what it is that they are doing to themselves  

One thing that I know for certain is that we are not defined by our past sins, but rather, by our commitment to change. We aren't the people we once were when we decide to be someone else and live that decision; it all boils down to a choice. 


Ask yourself: What do I choose for myself? Pain and darkness? Or light and healing? Because at the end of the day, only you can make that happen for yourself. No one can fix you but you. So what will it be?

One love