All These Scars Are Mine

Personally, I don't believe that there are days of the week or months that are predestinated to be good or bad ones, holding good or bad luck. But I do believe that that life is an ongoing, daily challenge, and while some days are easy ones to make it through, others are quite a fight, from the moment the alarm goes off in the morning, until I finally manage to fall asleep at night somehow.

Don't get me wrong: I don't intend to complain. Far from it! As a matter of fact I know people who would have every reason to to complain, to whine, but most of them don't. No, they just don't do it. I have great respect for them, as every day of their lives is a struggle. I do what I can to help them, of course, but most of the time my humble efforts to support them only make both of us feel worse, but at least they make their lives a bit easier to deal with.

What I find interesting about it is, that while those people seem to have mostly memories of good times and enjoyable moments of their lives, for me it sadly seems more easy to recall situations, days and events that left me with bad feelings. I am aware of the fact that it is mostly a question of the personal mindset. I had the chance to discuss this with psychologists, and they convinced me that this is a sensible way to think of it.

Fighting personal demons means to confront them. It doesn't matter what it is that scares us, it doesn't matter what we are running away from. If we want to bring on a change, if we want to take back control of our life, we have to stop running away. We have toturn around and face what is frightening us. The demons may not go away, but as soon as we know them, as soon as we name them, they become less powerful, less important, and we may get back what could be called inner peace and a normal life.

For me, September has brought to me some of the most significant changes to my personal life ever. Even while I am writing these lines I am not sure whether I really should share this with the rest of the world. Well, if you can read this, my decision was obviously to finish the draft and publish this text, and I am about to share some personal bits of my life with you, which left quite some scars running across both, my heart as well as my soul.

Three years ago my to-be ex-wife had just moved out of the place we had shared for years. That semidetached house became quite a weird place to live in, even more so as I only spent the weekends there. Finding yourself abandoned, facing the remains of what was meant to be a part of the future, isn't the easiest life situation to deal with. To me, it was even harder as I had to clean up the place and prepare my own move, finding myself questioning many of my decisions, again and again. Learning that the significant other had decided to leave me was by far the worst experience I had made so far at that point in my life. Literally watching things falling apart took it to the next level, and I felt sick of life back then. Obviously, I chose not to use a quick exit.

Last year I had just hit the ground, going down in a spiral of what the doctors (later) referred to as burnout. At that point, I didn't expect that it would take me only half a year to get up on my feet again. Only few things kept me going, again I considered the ultimate exit strategy. Luckily, I managed to ask for professional help and support. That I had to give up my job, well, it was an absolute necessity. That I had to move again was an inevitable decision, which I did even welcome. It was one thing to discover that I had reached a dead end in my life; to even start making the needed U-turn was a completely different story. I didn't expect it to work out for me. Today, I am happy it did.

Those incidents were like a slap in the face that made me think a lot. Both were wake-up calls, but somehow I didn't really get up the first time. Thinking and writing about those chapters of my life still hurts. I never seriously considered a relationship ever since, but this may change. I found a new job which I like very much. Taking a step back and looking at my current situation, my life from a distance, I tend to say that things look a lot better now, and I am grateful that I (somehow) managed to get my life back, even though there are some scars left to remind me.

But all these scars, they are mine.


PS: Some of you may have realised it that this post's title is a line taken from the lyrics of a song by INXS, 'The Gift', which is one of my all-time favorite songs.