Change Starts With Admitting Your Pain.

Nothing will change until we are honest with ourselves.

I remember the year when I finally felt I couldn’t take it anymore — it was 2019.

I had recently turned twenty-three, and I was feeling the most miserable I’d ever felt.

My job at the time was soul-sucking. My finances weren’t a crazy mess, but I wasn’t doing more (like I said I would), and my personal development journey had stalled.

I call this time of my life my ‘identity crisis.’

Before this, I’d never considered asking for help.

I always thought I was supposed to be a strong soldier and stick it out on my own, but at that moment, I couldn’t.

I felt like a shell of a person, and I had no idea how to get back to feeling whole again.

This is when I decided to pursue professional help.

If you find yourself in a similar spot, feeling miserable and like you’re going nowhere, I highly recommend seeking this help.

It will help you sort through all those emotions and, more importantly, figure out where they are coming from.

I didn’t know this then, but I was in so much pain I had gone numb.

I had lost my ability to feel, and I didn’t know how to get it back on my own.

Fortunately, I was able to get the help I needed.

And thanks to being brave enough to accept all the pain I was feeling, I finally began to change.

Change starts with accepting and acknowledging all your pain.

When you acknowledge your pain, you free yourself to do something about it.

At first, I didn’t want to admit all the pain I was in because I was afraid of what I would find.

I was scared that digging into my past and my trauma would unveil things that I wasn’t strong enough to deal with.

This is why seeking professional help (in my opinion) is a must.

A counselor/therapist can teach you skills and give you tools to help you navigate and manage the emotions that come up when going on a healing journey.

On top of that, feeling like you have someone to hold your hand gives you a push of encouragement to continue.

The truth is if my counselor hadn’t held my hand that first year that I started seeing her, I wouldn’t have continued.

But thanks to feeling supported and accepted (and made to feel like this is all normal, which it is), I continued on the journey of acknowledging and healing my pain.

But to start, you have to be honest with yourself in the first place.

Most people don’t want to admit they aren’t happy and content.

Most people are embarrassed to admit that they took a turn and got lost somewhere along the way.

But one thing they know for sure is that this isn’t where they wanted to go.

Admitting and accepting that this is not how you want things to be is the first step to freeing yourself.

When you accept the reality of not liking where you are, you’ve freed yourself to do something about it.

Your pain will push you to move in a different direction. Then inspiration will follow.

I learned this from many of the entrepreneurs I met while I was a part of an MLM (Multilevel marketing company).

I didn’t understand what this meant until now that I’m able to look back and see how my pain pushed me.

I didn’t seek professional help because I was inspired or motivated. I sought help because I was miserable.

And I kept seeking that help because much of my life was still not moving forward (I will take the blame for that).

It wasn’t until God intervened (in the form of events leading me to move out of the house I was living in) that I found the freedom to begin taking chances and risks — to genuinely change.

It wasn’t until my pain was at its worst that I decided to turn things around.

Fortunately, the pain led to inspiration, which is why I’m writing to you.

Along this journey, I found writing as a way to help process my emotions, and at the same time, I thought, ‘This was a great way to share my thoughts and life lessons.’

I’ve continued to write up until this point because my pain gave way to inspiration.

I’m inspired to write now because I know there is someone out there in a similar spot, feeling very similar to how I felt, needing encouragement and words of wisdom.

I wish I had a resource like Medium to find helpful and encouraging words.

That’s why I’m here, and if at any point I’ve helped you, given you words of encouragement, made you think, or taught you a lesson, I’m thrilled because that’s all I’ve set out to do — help.

Allow your pain to tell you what you don’t want — trust it and believe it.

This may sound like backward advice, but it’s no different than setting boundaries (with yourself).

I’ve learned that your pain is also a way your emotions and feelings tell you something isn’t okay.

And for a very long time, I ignored that, and because of that, I ended up in situations and circumstances I wasn’t happy or content with.

I wonder what would have happened if I had listened to that pain. If I had believed it in? I probably would have done something about it much sooner.

Your pain isn’t your enemy.

Sure, it’s not something we’re happy to feel, but it is a warning that signals to us something isn’t right.

God placed it there, which means there must be a function for it, right?

I now realize your pain is there to tell you what you don’t want or shouldn’t pursue.

Now, let’s not confuse the pain of misery with the pain of, for example, discipline.

Those are two very different kinds of pain. Once actually helps you move forward, and feels rewarding after the fact.

The pain I’m talking about is that constant nagging feeling in the back of your mind and at the bottom of your gut telling you this isn’t who and where you’re supposed to be.

It’s that feeling that tells you things are supposed to be different.

I believe we have those thoughts and feelings because we’ve lost our way. We’ve gotten lost on the path to fulfilling our purpose.

But if you admit your pain, acknowledge it, and listen to it, you have an opportunity to start getting back on the right path.

You got this!