What Rock Bottom Feels Like
By Melissa K. Vassar-Belloso
There are many days I wake up and wonder why I had to wake up again but even more times in my life where I’ve felt the brush burns on my ass from rock bottom and just eventually climbed out again. It’s hard to say where I’d be if I were a less stubborn person. I’d probably be dead.
I think after overcoming mental illness, an autoimmune disease, a blood disease and a number of life events bordering on emotional abuse I’ve just grown very thick skin. It’s not to say these things don’t still hurt but I think the measure of a person being happy or being successful is how many times you weren’t and tried again anyways. I’ve hit rock bottom so many times in the last 14 or so years I think I’m finally starting to realize it’s not important to count how many bad things are going on but to look at how many times you got up, moved on and became a better person for it.
I don’t think any person is perfect by any means. This means we’ll screw up, make bad decisions and sometimes hit rough spots in life where it’s hard to see a good thing coming out of it. We’ll have days where we’re poor, unhappy, disappointed, sick or lost. But it’s important too to have perspective that in a way we all share that experience as human beings. We all have something to bear and in the same sense we all have something making it worth it. We all have some reason we get out of bed. I think it’s hard to determine what that is until you’ve hit the ground hard at least a few times.
Maybe you aren’t there yet or maybe you just don’t have the strength to climb up yet but I think personally I’d like to keep waking up. I have a lot of things to be thankful for and a lot of things to be happy about. Yet,somehow in a way I don’t know if the couple of scrapes I got at rock bottom might have just made them a little more valuable.
