It’s easy to forget the pain.

We all do it. As a woman and a mother, I’m convinced that if more women remembered the discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth, there would be a lot more only children in this world. But as time goes by, we forget.

The same holds true for my knee surgery. It was only a little over 5 weeks ago, but I set the date for my other knee to be replaced in my follow-up appointment earlier this week. Just like any other choice we willingly make to go through pain, for whatever reason, we do it because there’s a promise of something better on the other side.

Back to the familiar and wonderful feeling of being in control.

Despite going through many years of often excruciating knee pain, that memory is already fading — perhaps because it was temporarily replaced by post-op pain and healing. Before, I knew there was only a limited amount of improvement I could possibly see; now, every day brings a noticeable improvement.

Forgetting pain is a good and natural thing. Forgetting the lessons, though? The things you swear to yourself you’ll never, ever do, again? No. I caused irreparable harm by allowing myself to become so overweight that I damaged parts of my body. Typically, people who need total knee replacements are at least 10 to 15 years older than I am, and my doctor first brought it up with me roughly 12 years ago.

We’re humans, though, and we often tend to forget the lessons learned in times of stress and return to our previous norms. So when, by necessity, I had to change my normal way of eating because of surgery, and I gained weight because of it, I feared that part of me that might see that as a return to normal — the normal I knew for most of my adult life.

I found myself yearning for the feeling I have when I am totally in control. That’s where I feel the best. It’s my comfort zone, and where my body and brain moves toward. The best part? That’s the normal I’ve come to know over the last nearly five years, rather than the destructive normal that came before.

Sometimes, the lessons learned aren’t enough to keep us from repeating mistakes of the past, but every day, this feels a bit more like coming home. The path to home isn’t far away, now, at all.