Flip the coin

I always thought that heartbreak and hope could never coexist, that hope was the antithesis of heartbreak, but life lately has changed my perspective. I am no stranger to heartbreak; I have experienced it in many different forms over the years. The earliest heartbreak I remember was when I was 3 years old and someone that I thought was my best friend suddenly wanted nothing more to do with me. My heart was broken again when another best friend vanished when I was 9, when my grandma died when I was 11, when I injured my hip when I was 16. I could go on and on, but though heartbreak was familiar to me, how to cope with it was not. Pain is something that I was taught, consciously and subconsciously to live with, not to live through. I carried my physical and emotional pain around with me unaware of the consequences their weight would bring.

The pain in my heart was easier to mask. I created a wall around it and kept it buried deep within me. Often, the pain would seep out and I would hide myself until it passed because I didn’t want to have to acknowledge it to anybody else. Every time I tried to share my pain, I was met with comments like “you need to pray harder”, “you must be doing something wrong to keep feeling this way”, “you need to think about what God is punishing you for”. I was told that as Christians, we are meant to overcome and conquer. But I was not conquering or overcoming anything, and that only added to my emotional pain. I became very protective of my pain, no one would understand it, and no one could take it away so why should I share it. All the while I had no idea that the pain that I was burying so deep was leaking into my body because I would not let it out.

On the other hand, the pain in my body was not easy to hide. How could I acknowledge my physical pain? Pain makes you weak and I couldn’t be weak. I had to be strong, always. So, I let go of so many things I loved, running, football, cycling because every time I tried to do those things, I was reminded of the pain. Somehow the reminders were even more painful than the origin of the pain itself so I had to avoid them at all costs. I could not, and would not acknowledge the extent of the physical pain and the heartbreak that it had caused. I convinced myself that I was happier having given up on those things I loved. I was happier doing less and being inside all the time. After all, how was anyone going to help me? How was I going to help myself?

And so, my life went on. I became so good at hiding my emotional and physical pain, I built up my tolerance to pain. I believed that it made me strong to feel no pain. But the thing is pain is a signal. Pain screams at us that something within us needs urgent attention. While I was ignoring the pain, my heart and body were dying from the weight of it. And I was none the wiser, my ignorance is bliss tactics were working so well. They were working so well that I forgot who I was before the pain, I forgot what it was like to enjoy a moment, to look forward to the future. I was just existing, floating from one moment to another without feeling. If I opened myself up to feel, the pain would attack fast so I felt nothing. Or so I thought, slowly and surely, my heart and my body began to give way. Of course I didn’t notice, I kept pressing on, I kept up appearances until I could not.

Running away from pain is an extreme sport but it is a sport you cannot win. Eventually the pain will catch up to you and overtake you. I kept ignoring the signals my heart and my body were sending to me, but the pain had nowhere to go and started to trickle out of me. My hip gave out, then my knee gave out and suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore. All the pain I had been trying to avoid burst on through my body and my heart like a flood. My walls collapsed and there I stood, defenceless, afraid and hopeless. Facing the reality that I was in so much pain was almost unbearable. I had unknowingly been experiencing the five stages of grief, the denial through masking, the anger through acting out, the bargaining through doing less and now I found myself in depression. A depression that scared me so much because of the hopelessness I felt. My heart and body were shattered from all the weight they had been carrying and my mind turned against me.

My mind whispered all sorts of nasty things to me, it told me I was worthless, I was a disappointment, I would never amount to anything. And I almost believed my mind. The hopelessness was killing me. It was isolating me and eating away at me piece by piece. I knew I had failed myself. It was so tempting to stay there but I knew I never wanted to feel that way again. I truly felt like there was only one way out of that hopelessness and that was a choice I was not willing to make. I recognised that the reason I was in that position in the first place was because I had seen pain as a foe instead of a friend. I was always fighting the pain, fighting to hide it, to ignore it and that left me depleted. Finding myself at my lowest point, something had to change or I was doomed to end up at that point once again. And that was how I landed in the final stage of grief, acceptance.

With no more energy left to fight, I allowed myself for the first time ever to see and feel the pain. As I let my heart break and my body falter, I started to experience a feeling that I thought was lost, hope. I dared to imagine a time my heart would no longer be broken and my body would no longer be shattered. I started to envision what my life could look like, what a new version of me would be like. I began to see pain for what it really was, an eye opener. When I finally acknowledged the pain, it gave me a chance to reflect on what I had lost and adjust to what I had gained. Reflecting on what I had lost is the easy part, I can see that with my eyes and feel it in my core. But what had I gained? That was the real work. Sometimes, the only thing I had gained was a lesson but even that gave me hope for a future where I could do things differently. And sometimes, the lesson wasn’t even for me but to share with someone else. And that is okay because it is not nice to see others in pain either, and if my pain can make theirs hurt a little less, that is fine by me.

Now I see heartbreak and hope as two sides of the same coin in the currency of pain. Pain is a guarantee in this life. It is impossible to be human and avoid pain. And I have already experienced the drawbacks of pain avoidance, the limitations I placed on myself and the paralysis I was stuck in are undesirable to me now. In Romans 5:3&4, Paul wrote that we can rejoice when we face trouble and trials because they help us develop endurance, which develops our character, and that character develops hope in us. I know that I will feel pain again, I know I will probably experience even worse pain than I ever have, but I will not wallow in the heartbreak. Pain is nature’s way of teaching us how to adapt, how to fight and how to overcome. I was stuck in the heartbreak because all I wanted was to wish the pain away but the pain has shown me another way to live, to think and to feel. So now I choose to flip that coin over and choose hope.