Every morning, without fail, I wake up in pain. Before I even have a chance to organize my thoughts or orient myself to the day, discomfort rolls in like an early fog—uninvited, unwelcome, but expected. It’s a familiar ritual, this ache that greets consciousness. Some of it is the ordinary resistance of a body roused from sleep. I’ve never been a morning person, and I’ve long accepted that waking up can feel like a minor betrayal by the body.

But this goes deeper. There is a more profound, more insidious discomfort beneath the surface. My guts often hurt. If I slow down enough to scan each part of my body, I can find a twinge or an ache in almost every region. At one time, I might have chalked this up entirely to age, but now I recognize something more sobering: much of this is self-inflicted. Not in the sense of intentional harm, but in the slow, daily drift of choices left unexamined. The food I eat—or don’t. The movement I neglect. The hours I spend still when my body aches to move. It doesn’t have to be this way.

And then comes the second pain. This one is not physical. It is emotional, existential—the dull thud of dread when I remember it’s a workday. I have a job, and it pays some bills, but it exacts a toll far higher than it should. It steals the one currency that matters most: time. That most fragile, non-renewable resource, already more behind me than ahead. The work I do does not speak to who I am or what I value. It feels like time bartered away for obligations that multiply without end.

Again, if I really examine it, I have to admit that some of this too is self-inflicted. I could have taken action sooner, could have made different choices, could have risked more for something that mattered. But recrimination has no productive value here. There’s no going back to revise the decisions of yesterday. There is only the painful recognition that I must choose differently today.

Then, as if to crown the experience, there is the third pain. It’s the quiet panic of financial uncertainty. This morning I looked at my bills and realized I may not be able to pay all of them this month. And this isn’t the first time. Even though I’m earning more right now—thanks to the seasonal uptick in music gigs—unexpected expenses have outpaced the temporary gains. There is a gnawing anxiety in this kind of uncertainty. It whispers worst-case scenarios into your ear before you’ve even had coffee.

Here again, I encounter the same refrain: some of this, too, is within my control. I am not powerless. But the patterns are entrenched, and I’ve never quite managed to make the leap into a financial reality that offers both security and integrity.

So there I am, nearly every day, greeted by three categories of pain. Physical, emotional, financial. None of them abstract. All of them deeply personal. All of them—in some way—connected to choices I can make, if not today, then soon.

These aren’t the kinds of priorities that can be shuffled into a neat list. These are life-level pains. And while I will never sacrifice my recovery, my relationships, or the meaning that makes life worth living, I have to admit that these three areas demand attention. They are not optional. They do not wait politely in the wings.

Recovery has taught me this: change is slow. Real change, the kind that builds a new life, is glacial in its movement but monumental in its outcome. The initial act—abstaining from substances—was immediate. It mattered enormously. But the subtler shifts in how I live, think, eat, move, earn, and dream? Those take time.

I’ve seen progress in areas like health before. I know from experience that changes in diet and movement, though slow, create tangible results. I can return to that path. I can walk it again.

But the professional transformation—the creation of a livelihood that doesn’t extract my soul—that remains uncharted territory. I have no template for that. And so it scares me. Not in the vague way of imagined monsters, but in the real, sobering way that unfamiliar freedom often does.

Yet even this fear is a kind of signal. Because what terrifies me more is the idea of doing nothing. Of waking up five years from now with the same pain, the same dread, the same bills, and realizing I let the clock run out on choices I could have made.

These three discomforts—body, soul, and wallet—are not enemies. They are messengers. And the message is clear: You are not stuck. You are not powerless. You are not done.

The pain is real. But so is the possibility.