Pain into Passion

25th January 2016

I’m standing on a hill overlooking hundreds of miles. Scenery, fields, trees, the sky, houses, cars and people just going about their day to day lives. Has anyone noticed I’m here? Looking down and just watching them, watching life. Probably not. Eventually someone would notice, but right now I’m just here – unnoticed, undiscovered and unobtrusive. I sit on a little bench as the sun starts setting and the cold wintery air tries to pierce through my layers and my skin. I can see my breath as it escapes the warmth of my body and disperses into the mist hovering the fields around me.

I feel alone. The type of loneliness where you can be sat in the middle of a room surrounded by a hundred of your friends yet you’re still alone. As I look out and see the hundreds of cars driving back from work eager to get home to their families, people walking hastily down the streets anxious to get out of the cold and into the warm to nestle in for the night, it hits me how vastly huge the world is that I live in. The hundreds of people I am watching right now but don’t even know. The millions more who live in my country and the billions beyond that who live on our planet. The world is a scarily big place and sometimes I can’t help but look out and feel so isolated and separated in the midst of so many thousands of people, immersed in a restless world that never sleeps, never rests and never stops. 

I feel an ache in my heart. A pain that I can’t seem to shake. I haven’t injured myself, I haven’t physically hurt myself, but that pain – it’s real. And the more I let myself go there, the more I let my mind run free from the restrictions I so often put around it, the more real the pain becomes. Suddenly I’m so overwhelmed, everything becomes too much. I choke up and before I can gain back any control the tears come bursting through, exploding out as if they had been tied up and restricted for far too long. I’m crying, sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. All I can do is sit back, my arms tightly embracing my legs, trying to shrink into the smallest ball I can possibly become, powerlessly giving in to the pain that’s now so bad I momentarily think maybe this is what having a heart attack feels like. 

As I let it happen, as I let the tears run freely, I think back over the years trying hard to remember why this pain and these feelings feel foreign yet so simultaneously familiar. There haven’t been many moments like this in my life but suddenly I realise the ones that have happened have been strangely significant and impacted my life in ways nothing else ever has. 

I was about 17 and I became very very close to a girl called Lucy. She, like me, was addicted to drugs – mainly heroine – but unlike me, she had no life. She was homeless in Oxford, lived under the bridge where so many others spent countless nights, she at the age of 24 literally had nothing and no one. We met one night in Oxford and our friendship grew from there. I used to bring her food and fags and we spent days and nights in each other’s company talking about life and faith and what we would one day go on to achieve. I will never ever forget the day I got the phone call from the police, saying they had found my number on her old bashed up pay as you go phone that never had any credit on it, and I needed to come in to identify her body. She had committed suicide. No note, no message, no warning, no nothing. She had taken an overdose and they had found her body under the bridge. They tried numerous numbers on her phone but they were all dealers or crack addicts who couldn’t care less. I didn’t even know her surname. I still decided to go in and identified her as Lucy but I couldn’t tell them anything else. Till this day I will remember that moment standing next to her cold hard body, eyes sunken in, face so pale, she was gone. That was the pain. The same pain. The pain of such sorrow, such a monumental loss, a moment I felt more alone than ever before. For days and weeks after, I would think about her, and that same pain would crash in all over again. I would never ever see her again. She was gone. Gone from this world. Gone from my life. There were moments I wanted to go and do the same. Moments where I had so much anger inside of me towards this world and the life I had been given, I wanted to shove two fingers up at it and take back control and follow in Lucy’s footsteps. 

But actually something else happened. I began to see life differently. It was almost like a surge of determination started taking over inside. Once the pain stopped completely choking me and space freed up for me to actually be able to think again, I knew deep down I didn’t want to end up like Lucy. I didn’t want this world to swallow me up like it had done so many others close to me.

As I’m standing on a hill overlooking hundreds of miles, the uncontrollable sobbing gradually subsiding, the intensity of the pain slowly decreasing, I’m reminded of something a wise friend once shared with me; “Pain is the fuel for passion – it energises us with an intensity to change that we don’t normally possess.” That statement to me couldn’t be more true. You see, when Lucy died something in me that day changed. It didn’t suddenly transform my life overnight and I became Margaret Thatcher. No way, not even close. But it gave me a passion inside, a determination to change my current circumstances and do something with the life I had been given. Within a matter of months after Lucy’s death I broke into the Scotland Under 21’s international hockey squad. Not long after I met some people through an organisation called Christians in Sport who have since played an incredibly significant and enormous part in me finding a faith and starting the journey which years on has helped me get to where I am today. It’s not been plain sailing and during the last 10 years it has been one endlessly long hurdle race and I’m still nowhere near the finish. Sometimes the jumps are too high or my legs get too tired and I mess up, give up and temporarily make a mess of the whole course, but eventually we find our feet again, we muster up the energy once more to keep going and we get back on track. That pain all those years ago, the same pain which has reared its ugly head on multiple occasions throughout my life, it could crush me or it could push me. And I chose for it to push me. Just like now, it’s been a heavy and tough week for different reasons, but I have felt the same pain boil up inside of me. Do I let it destroy me? Momentarily I let it consume me. Momentarily I let it come out. But that’s just it, it’s the word momentarily. Then I take back the control, I see the pain for what it really is, and I use it to propel me into whatever lies ahead of me. 

Some people say time heals all wounds. I don’t agree. The wounds will always be there but over time they are protected and covered by scar tissue and the pain lessens. But the wounds are never fully gone. To me they are the reminder to keep on going, each one holds a lesson and I was taught through it, it was that pain which fuelled the passion to choose a different path, to make a different choice, the scars remind me I’m still fighting the race and as of yet nothing has been able to stop me.

We live in a world of over 7 billion people. Yes, sometimes I look out and feel like I’m being swallowed up by the vast enormity of life and everything in it. Yes at times I can be surrounded by a thousand people and still feel like I’m standing all alone. But it’s in those moments that I look up and my faith becomes more real than ever before. It’s in those moments that I know I serve and am loved by a God who is larger than the planet I live on, bigger than the 7 billion people who live on it and greater than every single thing that tries to stop me or hurt me as I attempt to complete my journey through life. 

This week has been tough but I know it’s also going to be instrumental to me for my future. I’m taking every bit of pain and I’m going to make sure I learn every possible lesson I can out of it. Sometimes hurt is needed to make us grow. Sometimes failure is needed to make us know. Sometimes loss is needed to make us gain. And often the greatest lessons are learnt through our deepest pain.