The best way to describe how I feel right now is “emotionally queasy”. It’s ironic, seeing as I was actually physically queasy just two or three weeks ago.

Consider a night of too much drinking. Your body has to get rid of the poison. So, you throw it up. You feel better right after that. Then you start feeling bad again and eventually you puke some more. You feel better. Then there’s the dry heaves. Then you stop puking all together but still feel kinda shitty. You sleep it off and start feeling better enough to eat some soup, or maybe some bread. The food makes you feel bad, and you feel a little nauseous, but you keep it down. Baby steps up to real food again. During the next few days your stomach expands again and starts going back to normal.

Emotionally, I’d probably say that I’m just past the soup and bread and trying to move up to bigger things. My soul is still shrunk, but it’s getting more full every day.

I can’t think of a more perfect analogy. Being sick to your stomach is a different level of pain. It’s not like being injured. It’s pain from the inside. Purging the bad shit from your body. A few weeks ago, I drank too much, and I paid for it. It doesn’t just hurt you, either. Your friends take care of you. They see you at your worst. But they love you, anyway, even though you’re sick.

A few days ago, I swallowed some bad emotional shit, and now I’m paying for it in a similar way. And so are others. There was some puking involved. It’s a different kind of pain. It’s not like being flipped off or cussed at. It’s the kind of pain that frays your soul. It hurt like hell, but it had to be done. And that’s how it goes. But it happened, and now the worst is over, and things get better with time and effort. That’s the way I’m trying to think of it, anyway.

Life is about getting back up when you fall down. You can shelter yourself and try not to fall again, but that’s just as wrong as never getting back up again. But you don’t have to do it alone.

It takes me a long time to learn anything when life is concerned. Knowing something and putting it into practice are completely different things. I think this recent experience has pounded some of the things God wants me to learn into my brain a little more. I forget a lot of it, but some of it sticks. I hope that I learned something.

So, it just goes to show you. God turns bad things into good, somehow.

I still thank God for my friends every single day.