I’m Addicted to Suffering

I think I’ve gotten so good at surviving that I’ve never sat still long enough to ask myself how I actually feel about anything.

My only mission has been to crawl up the staircase of my own dysfunction. It’s where I feel safe.

If it doesn’t cause me pain and suffering, I can’t accept that. 

I think I cling to my wounds because I don’t know who I am without them.

My therapist said something in our last session that cracked me wide open.

“Our image of God mirrors our experience of our parents.”

In my case, that can’t be a healthy image to carry. And it makes so much sense now. 

That’s why I sit in a Christian meeting and hear only everything I’m not. Why I open the Bible and feel crushed under everything I need to fix before I’m worthy of His love.Why I struggle to pray, because why would God listen to me. 

I always thought my faith was weak. My love for God just wasn’t strong enough. A constant hum of anxiety that I hadn’t earned His favour. I turned faith into performance, because in my house, performance was the only way to be seen.

So maybe, I’m not failing at being a Christian.

I’m just drowning in a pain I never dared name.

I have spent my life being the “understanding” child.

I never let myself be angry at my mother, she was only 17 when she had me. What did she know about mothering? I never let myself be angry at my absent father, he was denied access as a weapon of revenge, and somehow I made that my burden too.

They were young. Inexperienced. Navigating parenthood with none of the resources available today, no parenting books, no advice online, no village of information to draw from.

My mother was supposed to be in school. Not wasting her life raising me. So I understood when she left me to my grandparents to raise.

I told myself their choices were just the side effects of their own youth and the era they were born into.

But in the quiet of my own mind, the narrative was different.

If I wasn’t angry at them, the fault had to belong to me.

I believed I stole my mother’s youth. I believed I shouldn’t have been born. I became a master at navigating dysfunction and surviving rejection ,but in the process, I stopped living.

Today, the “understanding” version of me is quiet.

Today, I am finally angry.

I am angry because being born was not my fault. A stable childhood was my right. It was never my job to earn love. It was theirs to provide it. It was never my job to please them and earn their love ,it was their job to love me just because I was.

I am labelled a trauma victim, taking medication to cope with PTSD. PTSD? I always thought that was what soldiers coming home from war carried. But this is exactly my problem. I never see my own pain as bad enough. I always thought I could handle it.

Until,

Marriage became my mirror. It reflected back to me all my broken pieces, and I didn’t like how they were cutting him.

The Bible became my mirror too. I hate that I can’t accept Jehovah’s love. That I don’t feel worthy enough for Jesus’s sacrifice. I hate what that means: that if I can’t accept it, it’s almost as if He died for nothing. Even a bird He views as worthy. Why can’t I accept that I am too?

Oh wait. I know why.

I’ve finally realised I need to heal not because it’s the right thing to do, but because I need my heart back.

I feel grief, anger and guilt all at the same time. It is exhausting to be me.

To heal, I have to finally sit still. Sit in the discomfort of letting go of a trauma I thought was normal. While grieving a mother who died at only 46.

She left me with all this pain, and it breaks my heart that she never met the healed woman I hope to become ,who is now going to push me, hard, so I can become the daughter she would be proud of.

My father proved my belief that I’m not worthy enough when he decided not to show up for my wedding.

He did come to my mother’s funeral, though. I suppose that makes everything okay.

I know she did the best she could with what she had. I loved my mother, she was mine, and all I ever wanted was for her to be happy. But I also know I cannot keep blaming myself for her limitations. It was her responsibility to accept her consequences and heal her own trauma, just like I am now taking responsibility for mine.

I have to learn to make room for the little girl in me who blamed herself for being born and hold her with grace, while being grateful that my mother was brave enough to keep me.

I am choosing to heal because I am tired of pain feeling safe.

Chaos is comfortable.

Peace feels like a threat. You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Love feels like a trap ,you’re waiting for the bill to arrive.

I have become addicted to my own suffering simply because I’ve mastered it.

I want to welcome love.

I want to give love without the heavy weight of expectation.

I don’t know how to do that yet. I don’t have a map for this version of life.

But I hope I heal. I hope I get my heart back, so I can finally be who I know I truly am, deep down, under all the layers of protection I built just to survive.

— Sushmita