The Only Answer I Have Left

 Even though I carry an unbelievable amount of pain in my body every day, I have finally come to accept—or at least I’m beginning to accept—that there are no answers outside of me.

I’ve searched.

I’ve researched.

I’ve looked everywhere for something that might help me understand what is happening and how to make it better.

And time after time, I have come up empty-handed.

Doctors have called me a mystery.

I have been given possibilities, treatments, and suggestions, but never the answer I have been searching for.

So what am I left with? What is the answer?

Give it all to God.

Surrender the endless searching.

The endless trying.

The endless hoping that the next answer will finally be the answer.

I’ve made the decision to stop looking.

To simply be with the pain.

Not because I like it.

Not because I’ve given up.

But because fighting against something I cannot control has exhausted me.

Maybe surrender isn’t giving up.

Maybe it’s finally putting down the weight I’ve been carrying.

I know myself well enough to know that surrender doesn’t come easily.

I’m a fighter.

A seeker.

I will keep looking until there is nowhere left to look.

But perhaps we sometimes have to reach a very low bottom before we’re willing to let go.

Maybe that’s where I’m heading.

And perhaps, strangely enough,

maybe that’s where the healing begins.

Putting the Pieces Together

 The more I learn about Neuroplasticity, the more I find myself looking back at the timing of my symptoms.

And this is where the pieces of the puzzle begin to come together.

My fibromyalgia showed up around the time I was finishing my AA degree and was asked to write a timeline of my life.

I had never put my life on paper before.

It was too painful.

But I completed the assignment.

And it brought me face-to-face with an enormous amount of emotional pain.

Around that same time, my daughter began displaying behaviors that frightened me.

Years later, my knee pain appeared after my doctor sent me to a pain clinic for an injection for a neck problem.

My daughter had visited places like that during her addiction, so simply being in that clinic brought up a tremendous amount of emotion.

And then there was the bladder pain.

It appeared a few months after my partner died.

He had been my rock.

When he was gone, it felt as though someone had pulled the ground out from underneath me.

I’m still learning how to find my balance.

I don’t know that I have all the answers.

But for the first time, I’m seeing something I hadn’t seen before.

These symptoms don’t feel like completely separate chapters anymore.

I’m beginning to see a thread running through them.

Emotional pain.

Loss.

Fear.

Trauma.

And a nervous system that may have spent a lifetime believing it needed to protect me.

As I put the pieces together, my story makes sense in a way it never has before.

And all of it seems to lead back to the same place:

a frightened little girl who learned very early to be afraid.

She learned to anticipate.

To brace.

To watch for danger.

Perhaps her body has been carrying those lessons all these years.

Maybe healing isn’t about fighting my body.

Maybe it’s about teaching that little girl—and the body that has protected her—that she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.

I don’t know exactly where this understanding will lead me.

But for the first time, I feel like I’m beginning to see the whole picture.

And sometimes seeing the picture

is the beginning of finding the way home.

Discovering Neuroplasticity

 A few months ago, I began reading about something I had never really understood before—the connection between the brain, the nervous system, and pain.

They call it neuroplasticity.

The idea that the brain and nervous system can create and maintain both emotional and physical pain was new to me.

There are tests you can take that can help you explore whether neuroplastic pain might be part of your story. I passed every one of them.

But more than the tests, I began looking at my own life.

And suddenly, things started to make sense.

Fibromyalgia was part of my story for many years.

So was chronic fatigue.

Both eventually disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived.

Then there was the knee pain.

I woke up one day with chronic pain in both knees.

There had been no injury.

Not one knee was worse than the other.

They simply hurt.

For years, I went from doctor to doctor looking for an explanation. I heard different possibilities, but never got a clear answer.

And then came the bladder pain.

The more I learned about neuroplasticity, the more I began wondering if there was a connection.

I’ve spent so much time trying to understand what was happening to my body.

Now I’m beginning to ask a different question:

What if my nervous system has learned to create pain as a way of protecting me?

It sounds strange.

And I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

But when I look at my history, I can’t ignore the possibility.

Maybe my body isn’t betraying me.

Maybe it has been trying to protect me even though I do t understand what that means.

And perhaps understanding that is the beginning of something new.

Instead of being afraid of my body,

maybe I can begin to listen to it.

Living in Uncertainty

 Uncertainty means letting go of control.

Control has been one of the ways I’ve tried to create safety my entire life. As a little girl, I learned to anticipate, watch, be careful, and figure out what others needed so I could avoid upsetting them.

As an adult, control took different forms. I helped people. I worked. I created. I searched for answers and tried to solve problems. When my body became painful, I searched for answers there too.

What is happening?

What can I do?

What should I try next?

There was always something to figure out.

So perhaps this new place feels so uncomfortable because I can’t control my way through it. I don’t know what comes next, and I don’t like not knowing.

But maybe I don’t have to fix the uncertainty. Maybe I can simply experience it.

I can feel restless without needing to escape the restlessness. I can feel uncertain without deciding something is wrong. I can be uncomfortable and still be safe.

That is a very different lesson for me.

I also don’t want to confuse surrender with giving up the things I love. I still want to create, teach, travel, and live. But perhaps there is a difference between doing something because I genuinely want to and doing something because I need to escape an uncomfortable feeling.

That distinction feels important.

Maybe I can choose.

Not react.

Not escape.

Not control.

Choose.

Perhaps that is what freedom will eventually feel like—not a life without discomfort or fear, but a life where those things don’t make my decisions for me.

Tonight, I’m still restless. I’m still uncomfortable. But maybe I don’t have to like this place yet. Maybe I simply need to get acquainted with it.

Maybe there is a space between fear and freedom—a place where I don’t have to know what comes next or rush to fill the silence.

A place where I can simply be.

Perhaps this is another kind of surrender.

Not surrendering because I’ve run out of answers, but because I no longer need to have all the answers.

I can sit.

I can breathe.

I can feel.

I can wait.

And maybe, slowly, I’ll discover that this strange place I’ve landed isn’t somewhere I need to escape.

Maybe it’s simply somewhere I’ve never learned to be.

And maybe…