We Have To Take Control Of Our Pain Or We’ll Hurt Others With It

It’s so easy to walk away from pain, to replace it with something else. It’s so easy to let that diversion take over your life, to give up and not try. What isn’t easy is facing pain or letting it go to come to the realization that pain is only temporary that you have power of it. I guess though, when you think about it, it’s hard to come to terms with having power over something that can destroy or make a person.

A friend of mine had a pretty good life. She had her troubles but I guess you could say they were nothing compared to how hard she was hit the day she found out her parents were getting a divorce. The realization that she didn’t know people as well as she thought was devastating. I guess she looked at herself and wondered if she even knew who she was. But, instead of facing the pain, she walked away. She found a escape in a guy she didn’t love but loved the fact he could get her away from the pain, a diversion. Because of that choice she lost the man she loved, the man she’d planned to spend the rest of her life with. He was willing to help but she was not willing to listen.

Another friend of mine was told every day by people at school that she was fat, that she was ugly, and that no one could ever love her. So, my friend decided the pain was too much. She cut herself so that the only pain she could feel was the pain on her once perfect smooth arms. But the names and negative words spoken over her life never went silent until she decided that the only way to stop the pain was to take her life. So she did. The saddest part of it all is that she was the most beautiful person I had ever met. inside and out!

People who say hurtful words are usually hurt themselves. I know this because the girls who bullied my friend cried every night after she took her own life because they had come to the realization that they too were in pain. Their way of ignoring the pain was to make someone else feel how they felt, worthless, not lovable. It was the day that my friend died that those girls realized they had to face their own pain.

And there’s my mother who, because she was rejected by her mother, turned to drugs and men and chose those things over her kids, over me. It started a cycle. I became my mother until the day I found out I would be a mother and that’s when I decided not to push my pain and rejection onto my child. Instead, I turned and faced my hurt.

There’s things in life that we are good at controlling and those we’re bad at controlling but what are the important things we should concentrate on controlling. Pain is only temporary. it comes and goes, and I easily avoided facing it before but at what cost? Is it worth losing the one you love or watching someone die thinking you were responsible because you were so hurt that it was just easier to lash out and hurt someone else in turn? When you don’t face the pain you make pain for others. You make others feel the pain you feel and sometimes you don’t realize till that person you loved so much leaves or until the person you bullied takes their life, until your child is a reflection of you.

Hurt people, hurt people. But to what cost?