The Only Way Out Is Through: Why I Stopped Running From Pain

I used to run from pain. I would look the other way when uncomfortable things showed up in my experience.

I would aim to fix people rather than empathize with them. I would talk instead of listening. I needed to be in control. I wanted to think my way out of things.

What I Did Not Know

I did not know the power of feeling. I thought hurt meant broken. I hated weak people. Which meant, in many ways, I secretly hated myself.

If it did not feel good, it was not worth the experience. I was on an all-sugar diet. I had not discovered the delicious taste of sweet and sour. The bitter notes that make the meal complete.

I did not see how resistance could be beneficial. I did not know how challenges were fine-tuning my desires. I did not recognize the satisfaction of overcoming. I wanted arrival without journey, victory without struggle.

The Walls I Built

I did not honor other people’s struggles. I was not comfortable being vulnerable. I had a fake it till you make it attitude. I was not being real.

I built walls around my heart and called them strength. I numbed myself to difficulty and called it toughness. I avoided my inner world entirely and called it pragmatism.

But the pain didn’t go anywhere. It just went underground. It showed up as restlessness, as irritability, as a vague sense that something was missing even when everything looked fine from the outside.

The Awareness

Then I had an awareness. Maybe I should try something new. Maybe running wasn’t working. Maybe the thing I was running from was the thing I needed most.

What if the only way to get past something was to go through it? Not around it. Not over it. Not by pretending it wasn’t there. But straight through the center of it.

Wizard Friends

So I started listening to my pain. And I realized it held an incalculable wisdom.

My grief was a wizard friend. My sadness was a medicine man. My uncertainty was a portal. These emotions I had spent my life avoiding were actually guides trying to show me something important.

Leaning into the things which felt uncomfortable put me into the next level of the maze. The pain was the door. The only door. I just couldn’t see it because I was so busy looking for another way in.

And paradoxically, I am finding that ease and well-being is on the other side of all that pain. Not instead of it. Through it. There’s a peace on the other side that you can’t get to any other way. A groundedness that only comes from having faced what you were afraid to face.

The way out is through. There is no shortcut. There never was.