Face It, Don’t Escape It

You can’t live your life if you’re spending all your time trying to escape it.

Life gets good. Life gets hard. Sometimes, life even gets overwhelming. The answer is never to run away from it. 

Ignoring the thing that you dread facing, avoiding the person that you need to have that conversation with, shoving down the fact that it’s hard to look in the mirror….none of it works. As a matter of fact, it makes everything worse. I’ve tried it all. 

What I wish I would have known and tried before hitting rocking bottom….is that I needed help facing my demons. I needed help fighting back against the darkness within me. I needed GOD to do the heavy lifting, and place people in my path that were willing and ready to be the wisdom, guidance, encouragement, and accountability that would set me free.

I had to let someone know that I was struggling, even when I felt like it didn’t make sense. Yes, I had to pray, but I couldn’t (and shouldn’t have) stopped there. I needed people that had been through similar hardships to help me face my own. I had to be vulnerable in an ugly and uncomfortable way. I needed people that loved me enough to tell me the truth and ask me the hard questions that I needed to sit with. 

So if you’re like me and have a habit of trying to escape from the dark corners of yourself – through distractions, alcohol, drugs, self harm, or anything that provides a temporary delusion – the time to fight back for the joy that is yours is now.

The only way out is through.