the art of hitting rock bottom

I heard something the other day that inspired me to write about this:

“Love the things that you most wished had not happened.”

It sounds completely contradictory. Why would I love everything that’s happened to me, things I desperately didn’t want to happen? Things that I spent hours and God knows how much mental energy worrying about. The gut-twisting, tear-inducing, lung-emptying nightmares that could go wrong.

At first, I probably thought about this from too shallow of a perspective. Why would I love the parking attendant beating me to my car whilst I run back remembering my parking clock is still sitting in my glovebox? Think deeper, Drew. Beyond parking tickets and road closures and taxes and whatever else gets your colourful language flowing, there is a much more useful perspective hiding inside that sentence.

I stopped the doomscrolling in its tracks and decided to give this some real brain power. What utterly shit event in my life do I love? The answer was clear. The one that’s led me to be obnoxious enough to write about these kinds of things assuming an audience will just appear. Obviously.

That event, the one I love now but once wished had never happened, was hitting rock bottom. It is a strange label because it feels both personal and hard to define. I like it though because it suggests a floor, and floors imply the possibility of rising. For me, this is what it looked like.

I’d say it started with just a lot of not a lot. I was young, far from wise, and pretty unweathered. Life went from calm to chaotic almost overnight. Things happened to me and my family that were outside of my control. Change arrived quicker than I could understand it. Changes at first that were out of my control. Then came the changes caused by my own wrongdoing, along with decisions to suppress the pain I was feeling through any means other than admitting it was painful. I drank more frequently and to a much greater volume because it took away the act of feeling. It gave me a break from the losses that kept piling up.

As I try to type out how this felt, there is an analogy I can’t get out of my head. What I see when I imagine it is myself hauling in a rope that’s weighed down heavily and only getting heavier. That weight was the loss, change and uncertainty I was continuously ignoring. Made heavier by my inability to ask for support and admit that I was hurt, the rope begins to run through my hands eventually to the point where I let go completely and there came the nothing. A lot of not a lot. That, if not worked out already, was my hope. Of which there was none.

Wake up. Another day. Mid-morning sun shines through the window. The blinds stay shut. The bed feels like an escape because at that moment, while I’m in it, nothing else can change. I need to get up. But what for? Why push when you feel hopeless? Why risk feeling anything else when you’re just sick of feeling? You want energy but can’t find it. You want a vision of a brighter future but can’t see it. Is it there at all? Maybe this is all that’s meant for me.

Maybe those were some of the thoughts that were going through my head at the time. I can’t remember much other than the feeling of having no strength to move forward. Why would I have any if I had no hope for myself and my future?

That was my rock bottom. A stretch of life defined by loss, change I was not ready for, and a hopeless fatigue that coloured everything. Enough of painting the picture.

Here’s the punchline. This whole experience, every single loss I encountered, the tears, the hours I spent unable to get out of bed to face life, the times I begged and pleaded for the feeling to end, and the whole practice of hitting rock bottom is and always will be the single experience that most defines me as who I am today. In fact, I think of this experience, my downfall to my lowest point, and it makes me feel physically sick to think about the idea of it never happening. If I lived it all again and had the choice between the path I took and an easy one where everything went according to plan, there is no chance I would choose anything different.

Existence is a gift but with existence comes suffering. That is the cost of this gift we are so truly lucky to have. In my case, my suffering was my beginning. The agonising pain I went through was the catalyst I needed to become the person I was meant to be.

The suffering is what makes life so beautiful. Life is full of contrasts. Chaos and order. War and peace. Love and hate. Joy and despair. Pleasure and pain. Everything abides by this law that for there to be good then there must be bad.

This does not mean that all suffering is fair because if there is one thing life is definitely not then that is fair. One way I like to think of unfair and unimaginable suffering that people go through is that maybe they went through it because they have the power to move forward and use their experience to help others at a great scale. The greatest and most heroic action anyone can take when they have been beaten up by life is to take that experience and turn it into a way to help others. It’s a testament to any loss or pain to stick your middle finger up at it and tell it you’re going to use it as a weapon to create something immensely positive.

So, suffering exists and not only does it exist, it’s an integral part of the human experience. Rock bottom is a reality for everyone in some definition or another, but the practice of hitting it could just turn out to be the most important moment in your life. A moment where you use suffering to blossom a new version of yourself that was always meant to be there.

You hear the saying that to become someone new the old you must be left behind. You must depart before you can arrive. In a way, it’s absolutely true. Because the suffering that life exposes to us can be extreme and it can test us in ways that we have never been tested before and obviously to go through something like that and come out the other side you will emerge a different person. Therefore, suffering is the natural process that results in true growth. It’s evolution.

Think about it long enough and it’s the way everything works. Metal is forged in fire to become stronger. Rain falls to spark and sustain life. Materials must be crushed and compacted to become useful. We are exactly the same. Suffering is inevitable and necessary for us to become who we are truly capable of becoming and for making the most out of the beautiful gift we have which is life.

So circling back, the message I am saying here is this. The practice of hitting rock bottom is an art. An art in which the process of mastering it is embedded in our genes and instincts like a sixth sense. A sense I like to call, if you forgive me sounding woo woo, the human spirit. The human spirit is the power we all possess to push on through unimaginable pain in order to survive. The severely ill patient who defied their diagnosis, the single parent surviving for years on end to provide for their family, the addict who pulls through recovery, the wounded soldier who becomes a paralympian, the refugee fleeing war and corruption.

The examples go on. We are all examples. We all have our own stories and have been through or are going through our own suffering. We all at some point in our lives are likely to drop down into rock bottom but we also have the ability to climb right back out of it again and emerge stronger and ready to make the most out of life.

When you find yourself in the trenches, remember that you are made for this. You are quite literally designed to deal with the suffering that you are experiencing. If you feel like you’re at rock bottom then know that it could be the most defining moment of your life if you’re aware of the innate ability you have to hold on and push through. You will emerge a completely different person for the better.

Yes, existence is a gift of which suffering comes with it but the true gift we all have is the power to overcome that suffering in order to properly savour that existence. It’s that gift, that with the right application can make hitting rock bottom the most transformative moment of our lives.