Peniel - Day 3...9:18pm

Despite knowing some of my positive attributes and characteristics, finally having people in my life I trust besides my parents who point out good things about who I am (things I know that they’re right about by the way), I am haunted by feelings of inadequacy. I think I may finally have a chance to beat this, if I can find a way to walk straight into the face of my pain. To stop trying to avoid and escape the things that are so hard to look at in my life. That is what I am trying so hard to do now. My goal is not to erase all my pain and enter a world where no pain exists, I tried for years to do just that. That world doesn’t exist on this plane. It is a fantasy, or a mask to be worn on the outside while dying on the inside, or living from one state of oblivion to another, a world of escapism. My goal is to find a way to become healthy enough to live in the real world, where confusing and painful things happen, without being crippled or overwhelmed by them. Without immediately being reduced to a state of hopelessness at the first sign of something negative. As scary as it is, I have hope. Hope for recovery, for wholeness. And hope that open wounds I can not even see within myself will heal, leaving only scars that may even fade with time.

But am I being foolish to feel this way? Am I simply laying down on the altar to be sacrificed again? Am I setting myself up for even more pain than what drove me to do this in the first place? I hope not, but I am afraid.

I don’t expect this healing to be immediate. For me to walk away from this period of isolation and searching totally whole and well. But I am hoping for the major work to have been done and healing to have begun, true healing, of the wound(s), not merely the many symptoms.

What makes this attempt different from times past where I have searched for healing? For one thing, I am on a quest for truth. Truth about myself, my relationship with God and others. Truth about why. And I am determined, though afraid, to seek out and discover that truth, regardless of the costs and pain. From childhood until now, I have done anything and everything I could do to avoid this pain, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Though my escapism almost always caused pain, that was not the intent. Even as a cutter and self-mutilator, the goal was to focus and change the pain, to mask the real pain inside by distracting myself with pain on the surface. If I want to solve my problem, I have to travel the path of truth, which unfortunately seems to lie somewhere in the general direction of the pain in my life.