The Subtle Art of Healing From Betrayal

"Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame." ~Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

He speaks the truth. I wish I could tell you that if you do x, y or z, your pain will vanish, your dreams will come true and all will be right in the world.
Actually, let me begin again.
He speaks the truth. And he's telling you exactly how to make your pain, well, not vanish but dissipate more quickly, and how to, slowly, make things right in your world.
The problem is that what he's telling us to do are things most of us don't want to do. He's telling us that the only way to come out the other side of the shitcircus that is betrayal is to feel the pain, to suffer, to engage in the struggle, to pull our shame and humiliation and profound sadness from the shadows and stare it down.
And none of that sounds fun.
Far better, we think, to embrace the lost weight, buy nice clothes, put on a smile and tell anyone who asks that things are jim-dandy, thanks for asking. Far better, we think, to pour ourselves an extra-large glass of Chardonnay before dinner. To do anything that keeps the pain at bay just a bit longer.
Cause admitting we're in pain, even to ourselves, sucks. It feels like victimhood. Vulnerability feels like a loss of power.
Besides, crying makes our eyes all puffy.
I've spent much of the past year avoiding my own pain. In the past few weeks, it has caught up to me. My pain likes to wake me up at 2 a.m. "Hey," it says, and begins cataloguing all the ways in which I've been sucker punched:
Frequently, my pain list works backwards. It begins with a professional disappointment that feels less like an oversight than a deliberate exclusion. And then there's all the ways in which I feel like a terrible mother because I have three wonderful kids who genuinely love spending time with me and all I can do is wish away the days until they're in school and I can have my quiet, solitary days back to write. And then I'm afraid that because I'm not appreciating these days with my children that the universe will snatch them from me. There will be a drowning. An automobile accident. A suicide.
Ah yes, a suicide. I get there after 30 minutes of stewing in my own anxiety. When my daughter was struggling in the fall, still not clearly diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, calling me in the middle of the night to tell me she "can't do this anymore." "This" was "life."
I never panicked. I talked with her for hours until she would fall asleep. And then I would drive like a bat out of hell for two hours to the city where she lived and I would talk to doctors and nurses and social workers and school psychologists and plead with them to help her.
She got help. She got a diagnosis after she told a psychiatrist that she couldn't keep herself safe, which is hospital code for "suicide risk".
And I carried on. I had two big assignments due so I worked on those in between visiting my daughter in the hospital.
I cried once and only briefly before chastising myself to stop it.
Stupidly, I took pride in that.
Even with everything I've learned about the value of tears, of feeling the pain, I couldn't let myself feel how much pain I was in.
It felt selfish to experience my own pain when my daughter's seemed worse. Those old scripts, learned from a childhood of living with addicts, took over. Be strong. Don't tell people what's going on because you'll be judged. Don't cry because you won't be able to stop. Take care of others, that's your job.
And so here I am. Months later. Awake through the night because my pain won't be ignored any longer. "The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering," Mark Manson tells us.
I have suffered the past months as I dodged my pain. I have felt edgy, bitter, judgemental, critical. My anxiety gets easily ignited by others' anxiety. I have felt anything but the profound sadness of learning that my daughter has a chronic illness with a high suicide rate that will likely require her to be medicated for much of her life. There's plenty we don't know. Whether her illness will get in the way of career aspirations, or travel plans, or her desire to have children of her own (it has a genetic component).
And I have busied myself too often with wondering about her future because it distracts me from my present pain.
And so pain wakes me at 2 a.m.
"Hello," it says. "I'm still here."