Dealing with Pain

Growing up, my grandmother had many sayings, one of her favourites being - the strongest hearts have the most scars.

Maybe she is right, maybe the pain and the discomfort we experience in life can serve as a great teacher, everyone has to deal with bumps, bruises, and pains in life.

Sometimes in life things happen to us that are outside our control, deciding how these experiences shape us is the hardest part. 

Throughout the last 7 years, I have seen people  endure incredible surgery, trauma and pain and talking to them, they informed me they would learn from it, grow, and move on.

Also I have witnessed those that go through horrible pain and don’t have strong hearts. They have broken hearts that just stay broken.  Grief can also break hearts and I think I can honestly say currently my grandmother is heartbroken and my mum worked through heartbreak at losing her father.

Many people carry scars through their life and these scars sabotage future events and relationships, this pattern of thinking and feeling leaves you stuck in this never ending circle.

This to many may sound dramatic but losing my golf due to my condition makes me feel pain, a kind of grief, I knew I needed to learn from this and find some kind of meaning from it and move forward.  It wasn’t until my wife made the conscious choice to address my pain by putting all my golf stuff away in my flight bag so it would be away out of my daily eyesight, I could then see things differently and my mindset could begin to alter. 
Don't get me wrong - this hasn't happened overnight or even over a week, this has taken months for me and I mean months.

An incredibly long drawn out process for me, this also made me look at the future of my condition, painful experiences like losing my golf began to feel not so negative.  In life, people either learn, grow and move on or forward or stay stuck in some kind of poor me, victim mode in a cycle of continual hurt.

I had to move on, transcend, and grow from the loss of my golf, I needed to be able to discuss my dad's golf, help friends with rules questions, help friends with aspects of their golf they are struggling with, however painful this felt.
I know this has required courage, a inner willingness, and the belief that I could move forward.

My permanent chest line is also a massive example of this, family and friends never believed that I could just have it put in, adapt and move forward because life isn't that easy.

For me, acceptance was my starting block, this had been processing away for months since the chest line was first mentioned back in 2016.  To me this sort of felt simple, I could choose to see and think differently about the chest line which would then change how I felt about it.  Again, this didn't happen overnight and has been an ongoing process over months and months, the hardest part was choosing to think and react differently, it required a lot of work mentally and emotionally and I openly admit, I am not fully in that 'place' yet, it has also required support from my wife, medical team and family and friends and the most important of all = TIME.

Acknowledging the line, knowing I would be emotionally and mentally affected as well as physically, helped start my healing process.  Often situations can become overwhelming and I have gone through that, been so overwhelmed that I couldn't see any positive way forward because I was consumed completely.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve experienced pain like this or pain from a broken heart, health diagnosis, job loss.  Pain is pain, and it’s all subjective. One person’s pain isn’t greater than another’s. We all feel, we all hurt, and ultimately, we all have a choice in how we deal with it.