I have been struggling to find the right word to describe something I have been considering over the past week. These thoughts began a few weeks ago in my lawyer’s office, as we were discussing strategy for a very complicated and acrimonious divorce case of which I am an unwilling participant, and unfortunately one of the two central players.  He had mentioned that the other party’s attorney had expressed doubts about her client’s balanced reasoning. It carried a subtext that anger and defensiveness, prejudices, and interpretations may have overtaken calm deductive equanimity in this person’s mind.

It was an hour-long meeting, with much discussed, and I took some time afterwards to mull and digest all that was said. Again and again, I struggled to find the word that best described the condition he had been talking about. “Perspective” kept sticking in my mind, continually blocking the word that I knew to be reaching for, and which was in common use. I knew it was not a word that was anything fancy, but for some reason it had eluded me until one day, in my therapist’s office, I attempted to understand an increasing sense of peace, self-direction, and focus that had enveloped me over the previous three or four weeks.

For years, I have unknowingly struggled with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The suspicions were always there: the disordered desk; the starting of numerous projects, hobbies, and passions, only to find the engine had run out of gas, collapsing into stalled failure; the hyperfocus, as I blocked out the noise around me, constantly nagging for the attention of my disordered mind… all to the detriment of the priorities necessary for life to move ahead…interfering with my work, health, and relationships. My therapist encouraged me to bring these concerns to my psychiatrist.

I already had done so at an annual appointment a year prior after my son was diagnosed with the same condition. At that earlier appointment he had been dismissive. I was a 63-year-old man with a good job and solid income. I had clearly learned some strategies that were carrying me through life. Was this really the time to seek treatment? I compliantly agreed, and he hurried me out to see his next patient. But it nagged me. I left unsatisfied. I felt I had a problem; locked in the room of my own mind with no way out.

Much had changed in the time between those appointments. My wife became distant. The stresses of life had become extraordinary as we both felt the burden of excessive workloads overlaid on top of my father-in-law’s cancer diagnosis. Alcohol and cannabis had become our releases, providing a false, temporary haven from the chaos around us. Problems emerged in the bedroom. Intimacy was lost, and we each retreated into our private worlds of loneliness and unfulfillment, culminating in a traumatic and tragic confrontation for which we each share measures of blame, but for which I have since carried the greater burden.

I eliminated the false succor of mind-numbing substances with remarkable ease after that fateful night. The violent break with the past performed a kind of reset for me that helped me observe that portion of my life with a greater sense of self-awareness. I already knew that was a place to which I never wanted to return.

But my life was in tatters. Ripped from the life I had known, my ADHD symptoms had taken a life of their own. Unable to focus, constantly hypervigilant, sleep-deprived, never at ease, I was now taking additional medication for depression on top of the anxiety medication that I had taken for years. I was now also taking medication for sleep, and another for the frequent panic attacks that have since thankfully departed. And so I revisited the discussion of ADHD treatment with my psychiatrist, and this time he agreed to carefully introduce a treatment that offered hope of release. It was not a cure-all in itself, but a key to unlock a door that had long remained closed.

It took a few months of careful scaling upwards to see results, and in some ways, they are difficult to dissect from an improvement in and settling of a particularly dangerous situation in which I had found myself. In time, a general sense of calm and measured focus reentered my life. My compromised executive functioning skills returned, stronger than before. No longer overwhelmed, I have reentered life with a focus on the future, and less wallowing in grief over a sorely lost but unsatisfying past. It is as if a veil has been lifted, and now I can better see the past and the look to the future with clearer eyes.

That simple word that had eluded me was objectivity. Or perhaps, more accurately, objectivity born of clarity. It is only one component of what I feel today. I recognize it as part of something far greater than myself with many facets that I still am attempting to understand. It walks the same path as self-awareness, mindfulness, calmness, peacefulness, even charity and joy. It is the tool that allows us to step beyond ourselves—to see the other side of another person’s reality, to subordinate the self in the quest for greater understanding. It is the tool we use in our quest for reason.

I loved my wife, far more than I think she ever knew, or than I was able to express. I can see now that we were an imperfect match, our aspirations ultimately leading us along different paths. We could not grow or seek our meaningful destinies together within the confines of a stagnant marriage. She was the first to sense that something fundamental had changed, while I clung to an imaginary vision of what I thought we had… or rather what I wished we had. When reality hit, it came with a vengeance that sent me to a bootcamp for growth and self-discovery: a road to clarity.

I have titled this blog Healing from Pain. It might have been better titled Healing through pain. As Khalil Gibran once wrote: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Perhaps that is what healing really is—not forgetting what happened, nor pretending it was necessary, but allowing suffering to widen our understanding of ourselves and of others.

Healing is not the disappearance of pain. It is the gradual transformation of pain into understanding. Sometimes the deepest wounds become the very places through which light enters our lives. Looking back, I would never choose the path that brought me here. Yet standing where I am today, I can finally see that the journey itself has been quietly remaking me… and continues to do so.