I’ve spent most of my life lost in daydreams and mental fantasies pretending to be loved because I believed that it wasn’t possible for me to be loved in reality. My whole life, I tried to prove that I was worthy of love because deep inside I believed that I’m fundamentally not good enough for it. I’m too sick, too weak, too poor, too boring, and too broken to be loved. I got caught up in promiscuity, providing sexual contact to whoever wanted it from me so I could get my needs met in exchange: to be held, touched, and accepted no matter how briefly. I needed someone else to make me feel as though maybe I wasn’t a walking disease to be avoided at all costs. My strategy didn’t work. It backfired. It left me feeling worse, not better, and it became an addictive cycle of craving a fix of any kind to numb the pain.

What was the solution? I call it the 7 C’s: Courage, Compassion, Character, Curiosity, Creativity, Calling, and Community. I’m going to break down what worked for me. As we say in recovery, “Take what you like and leave the rest.” I highly encourage you to try everything, especially the things you feel the most resistance toward. The places where we push back the most are the things that draw us the furthest from our comfort zones. If something is currently too much, you can circle back around to it later. Recovery is incremental. We take steps, sometimes baby steps, sometimes backward steps, but we do make progress. We can rewrite the scripts of our lives. We can overcome the pain of the past. We can come to a place where we feel worthy of love and belonging, and we can experience them for real.