It is OK to Hurt

I’m finding in life that it is ok to hurt – but to clarify, it is not ok to despair. I do not believe we were sent here to learn how to escape pain, as tempting as that is. We were sent here to feel pain and to feel joy. We are here to cry and to laugh, to hurt and to love. I know it sounds overly simplistic, but we cannot truly have one without the other, and we need them for our human experience.

The past little while, my spectrum of emotion has become much closer to apathy than I would like. And I can tell you it was awful. I’m not fully out of this emotional state, but I’m getting closer. Over a short amount of time, so many conflicting emotions and issues were pressing in on me and so I felt and it was easier to shut them all out than try to process them. And soon, my ‘adventures’ stopped happening and my motivation dwindled. In time, I was only focused on being efficient to avoid the pain that otherwise was present. I stopped feeling connected to the people around me – acting and saying the right things, but not feeling them.

 It wasn’t until recently that I realized this, and that fact alone scared me. I still retreat into this apathetic ‘haven’ but I am getting better at venturing out of this cave and experiencing life again.

Remember, it really is ok to hurt, and experiencing life means experiencing pain. Don’t despair, but don’t seek to never feel pain. You’ll build up a lot of empty yesterdays. So, together we can fill up our lives with adventures – the highs and lows of life. And along the way, we’ll make a life worth remembering.