The Unseen Battle: Addiction, Pain, and What It Really Means to Be Human

 

I was listening to I'll Leave A Light On For You by Papa Roach and Carrie Underwood, and my mind started spiraling. Suicide. Addiction. Overdoses. Mental disorders. Someone accidentally overdosing, not because they wanted to die, but because they just wanted to escape the pain for a little while.

Then, I thought about my son coming back into my life after enough time had passed for me to finally see, not just him, but myself. I thought about the two-year anniversary of losing the man I was crazy about, shaming myself the entire time for not understanding sooner how deeply generational trauma had controlled my entire life.

Then vs. now. The addict, the crazy, the clueless, the unlovable-but-desperately-wanting-to-be-loved person I was. A hypocrite, judgmental even as an addict, thinking my sins were somehow different than someone else’s. And that got me thinking…

When was the last time you looked at someone with an addiction and asked, "Hey, are you okay?"
When was the last time you approached a drunk man, a high woman, or the person everyone calls “crazy” and told them, "Hey, you matter. Someone is glad you exist."

What about the ones with mental disorders? The ones locked away in prison cells? Anyone ever riot for them? Ever tell them their lives mattered? Or do we just dismiss them because their struggles are different than ours?

I’m sober now, but the pain is just as heavy as it was before. Maybe heavier, because now I can’t numb it. Now, I see it. The books, the meetings, the disappointments, the crying, the never-ending cycle of bad days. Same story, new perspective. And I’ve realized something:

Addiction is not the problem.
The pain that comes before addiction, the pain everyone is running from, that’s the real battle.

We don’t all have trust funds or safety nets. We don’t all have parents who could catch us when we fell. Some of us have had to claw our way through life, alone. Some of us have lost parents before their time. Some of us have lost kids before their time. Some of us have lost everything, and we’re still trying to figure out why we even bother waking up in the morning.

But here’s the thing, we all have pain. Every last one of us. Whether you’re launching missiles while denying hurricane victims, screaming over political nonsense, getting trashed in the streets, drinking in high-rise offices, or snatching somebody else’s kids, it all comes from the same root. Hurt people hurt people. And most of the world is hurting.

Pain. That’s what we all have in common, whether we want to admit it or not. The real question is: will we ever actually face it?

Because the truth is right in front of us. It always has been. It’s in the Bible. It’s in the mirror. It’s in every damn thing we do. There’s no secret to life. The path is right there, but no one can force us to walk it.

And maybe that’s why it’s so damn hard to get to heaven.
Not because we weren’t told how.
But because we were too selfish to listen.

So instead of judging each other, reporting each other’s videos, and tearing each other down, maybe, just maybe, we could start with something simple.

Ask someone how their day was.
Not to attack them. Not to judge them. Not to fix them.
Just to remind them that they matter.

Because we are all human.
And we don’t treat each other like it.