The hurt doesn’t last forever. It just doesn’t. Sometimes it takes a while, but if you’re actively trying to sort through it, and pray about it, then it won’t. There comes a time when you win. When you beat what comes at you in your weakest moments. When you defeat what drags you down. This year the greatest Christmas gift I got was being able to beat what’s been making me nauseous.
I knew my nausea was a mental thing. Like, I was so afraid of something that it would make me feel sick, but I didn’t know what I was afraid of. I felt stuck. How could I stop being afraid of something when I didn’t know what I was afraid of? I spent months agonizing. I wrote about a lot of it, too. I was angry, I was depressed, I was afraid to do anything because I knew I would feel nauseous. I was at a low.
Being at that low set me back. I let myself get too distracted by all the pain I was feeling that I couldn’t solve my problem. I was falling deeper and deeper into this pit of teenage emotions. Then, right around Christmas, something clicked. I knew what I had to do, and how to beat it. I knew how to finally win. I’m not normal, but I’m a lot closer to normal than I was before. I can feel it. I know something’s changed, and I know I’m gonna keep it that way.
Over the last few months I really started to give up on feeling normal again. It had been so long, and I tried everything I could think of, but it seemed to do nothing. It seemed like it would last forever. Everything that I figured out around Christmas proves that I was wrong. Our pain doesn’t last forever, and it doesn’t plague us like we think it does. Another example:
I’ve had a few nightmares about my dog bite. All of them included at least one dog trying to hurt me, and I almost always woke up breathing heavy, and feeling terrified. Those dreams always stuck with me for a few days, at least, and after four years I can still remember them. On Christmas eve I had a nightmare about 10-15 dogs chasing me, and trying to kill me. That should’ve been one of the worst dreams, right? Well, it wasn’t. I woke up Christmas morning feeling fine. Pretty much all the pain, and fear, I had about the dog bite in general had drifted away.