Willingness

This post first appeared in As Diana O Sees It on July 20, 2023

A small group of us walked along a Swiss alpine riverbank. Our new friend, Matthieu*, spoke about run-ins with California state troopers, his alcohol and drug abuse, his personal bankruptcy, divorce, deportation from the United States separating him from his children, and his stay in a Swiss treatment center from which he had just checked out.

Why hadn't he sought help earlier on his path of destruction?

“I guess I needed to feel more pain,” he said with a smile.

Ah the gift of desperation!

I told them my story.

One year earlier on that same riverbank, when I had been living in the Swiss Alps for nearly 10 years and been sober for six, I had had a panic attack while running.

This panic attack had come about after the end of a long relationship that felt like a divorce. I had been using blame, busyness, denial, not eating, and running to avoid feelings.

That February morning, it was about 10 degrees below zero Celsius. Now looking back, it was suicidal to run alone, in that cold, and in that deserted area. About a mile down the snowy path, my body started to shake and sweat, my heart raced, my breath felt smothered, and my chest hurt.

"Am I going crazy or is my heart breaking?" I thought.

A few minutes went by and the dizziness went away. Breathing resumed enabling me to run back to my car. Exhausted yet grateful I hadn’t passed out, I called a friend.

“Don’t panic,” she told me. “Emotional pain will not kill you. Just lean into it.”

I expressed my willingness to go to any lengths to get rid of my obsessive suffering and fear of abandonment.

“A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one,” comes to mind. While the quote's attribution remains uncertain, it is a reminder about pain and its way of narrowing our focus and priorities.

That’s when I started the work.

That “gift of desperation" is something I thank daily.

(*name changed to protect anonymity)