The Long Goodbye to Pain

For most of my life,
love and pain arrived holding hands.

I did not know
where one ended
and the other began.

Pain was familiar.
Pain stayed.

Then something shifted.

For the first time,
I felt God not as distant,
but as a quiet presence within me—
steady, intimate, alive.

I saw how often I had searched for safety
in other people,
while the love I longed for
had been waiting patiently inside me all along.

As this truth settled,
old memories rose to the surface.

My father hurt us.
My mother told us it was love.

And so a child learned
a dangerous lesson:

that pain and love belonged together.

The pattern followed me into adulthood.
Pain brought attention.
Pain brought comfort.
Pain brought connection.

My body remembered
what my mind could not yet see.

Then one day,
after a deep and honest grief,
the pain softened for a moment.

Just long enough
for me to listen.

What surfaced was truth.

Years of doubting myself.
Years of questioning my own reality.
Old wounds repeated in new forms.

And for the first time,
I chose differently.

I stopped explaining.
Stopped abandoning myself.
Stopped calling harm by gentler names.

In prayer,
I saw the little girl I once was—
frightened, tender, trying so hard to be good.

And I saw her held by God.

Not judged.
Not fixed.

Simply loved.

The pain remained,
but something deeper relaxed.

I could breathe again.

Not healed yet.

But awake.

And once the light enters,
the shadows can no longer pretend
to be the truth.