Life is precious no matter whose life it is. I let my pain, our pain, nudge me to one side more than to another. Just like they did. They? I know! We separate ourselves from one another and we shouldn’t.

Opioids, addiction, loss of loved ones in life or death ended up with the development of the CDC Guidelines. The recommendations. This led to the current affairs and even our President declaring an emergency over it. It influenced further lack of care for even compliant pain patients and has caused more suffering.

The many who believed in over prescribing and the opioids being an epidemic couldn’t see or didn’t want to acknowledge that there are other people in the world who would end up losing, too.

By reducing and removing these analgesics without a plan in place to substitute relief the quality of life provided by these medications would lesson and some people would end up choosing suicide, and many would live with the ideations not knowing how to go on.

I suppose in it all our selfishness as human beings to want it our way disregards the need of others who aren’t us.

I’ve been selfish too.

We end up fighting for our causes, creating campaigns, starting movements, staying steadfast in our agendas which are in a sense born of pain in one aspect or other and then we blame each other.

I still believe that we all have choices and that responsibility for those choices should be on ourselves and that we should accept those consequences.

Addiction, any type of, is a mental health issue. I’ve learned that the impulses that drive people to do what they do are no longer their fault once they reach the point of losing clarity. to make proper decisions.  I understand better that when the point is reached where the mind has become so weakened by the addiction that the ability to make the better choice for themselves fails to exist.

I had taken this year for me. For my healing. I’m still healing and progressing.

I wish for all of us that the new year gives us all a new chance to heal from our pain whether in body, mind, or spirit and that we can all find peace in pain.

Journey on.