I have a confession to make, and I don't want to. Definitely not. It's awkward for everyone - sorry to dump an icky thing in your lap. But right now it's something I have to do.
Everything I have written is one thing. Everything I have felt is one thing. Six years of blog is preface to one thing.
PAIN.
I have so much pain.
Here arises the gatekeeper to assurance, sneering, mocking,
"What do you know about pain? You with your middle-class everything, moaning about trifles, you whiny shit, you whiny whiny whiny whiny shit. Waaaaaaaaaah. Waaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah."
I have so much pain.
I have so much pain in my body and I don't know why. I have seen so many doctors and none of them seem to be able to heal me.
I have so much pain in my heart and I don't know why. There is no poetry here. There is no esotericism, which is anaesthetic. There is so much pain. There just is.
These are the same pains. It's one thing and it rules me.
Everyone has pain in their heart. Everyone has rejection, insecurity. Everyone has a friend who killed himself, or worse. Everyone has a childhood with darkness in it, is saddled with doubt, loneliness, longing for transformation. But some people have a valve. Some people are very strong and I am not. It does not evacuate. I don't know why. Maybe because I don't evacuate it. I don't know why.
I am not content trying to pass the wound off as some kind of intellectual leverage anymore. That's a lie. I am exhausted from trying to hide it with flippancy, gestures of superiority, with pretend nihilism. I am exhausted by running from, obscuring the pain out of a sense of social obligation. I am so very, very tired of channeling it into judgmentalism, vindictiveness.
I know that this is not everything. I have been filled with beauty and love, but not for a long time. Not for a long, long time. Right now, every day is such a challenge. I don't know what I'm doing, what I believe, why I am filled with so much sorrow, how to change, how to heal. I have simply run out.
No, I am not suicidal, am not even Depressed really, just so god damned lost. So god damned lost and bewildered.
Sometimes I feel like there's an overpowering force at work in the world that seeks to destroy that within us that allows for happiness. And right now I feel overpowered.
So to know it, I am naming it.
I am naming it Enemy.
5 comments:
There is pain, we all have different forms of it.
I try to convert all my stored pain, to energy, an energy that powers me to happiness. Simple things like gatorade.
Also, it seems like people make it so sadness is bad thing. Fuck it, If you feel lie being miserable, you have a right to. Process it and cherish what is good.
My old man told me life is going to be filled with shit sandwiches, we just gotta choke through them and hope for a PB & J.
Charlie is a wise man.
There are ways out, just know that.
Everyone has their own answers, you just have to find yours.
I can guess at what you're feeling. I can't remember a time when I felt free from pain, mental and physical. There has been pain diagnosed as this or that disorder, pain left undiagnosed. My health care used to consist mostly of visits to psychologists, now it's dominated with visits to medical doctors, for chronic pain, unexplained, sometimes debilitating, generally depressing. As a seventeen-year-old my knees ache, my chest hurts, my heart races, my head throbs, my vision blurs, my spine pinches, I get dizzy, my joints ache, I throw up for no reason, my jaw cannot chew anything harder than a strawberry, I'm quickly exhausted, I wake up every morning feeling like I got run over by a car. My body wasn't always this bad. But these days, it physically hurts for me to smile or to sing. Sometimes to speak. It's like the universe is punishing me for all those days I refused to smile sing and speak because my mind hurt -
but all I can say is this: make sure you never equate the "overpowering force that destroys happiness" with the pain itself. Don't make pain your enemy. Because then it will always win. Always. :(
Oh - if you have time, you can read the post I wrote: "The Worst Thing That Could Happen." It's about pain. For whatever that's worth.
I'm not going to offer you platitudes, and I'm not going to give you words of wisdom. I know I would not want that, because this pain is your own pain and no-one else can tell you how it feels or how to deal with it.
I had no idea, Matt. I really should have known, considering how many things you have said over the years have sung to me.
How many different drugs have they given you, over and over? What label have they saddled you with? Acute Biological Depression, Paranoia and Anxiety. That is me, Renee. It shouldn't be. I am more than my pain.
Maybe you hide behind your own intelligence and witticisms; I hide behind my own humor and self-depreciation. I want very much to tell you that I know some of what you feel; my pain is my own, but perhaps my pain is similar to yours.
I believe, no, I know, that for me, no doctor can heal me, no pill can take away my pain. It helps, especially with the paranoia (courtesy of one of my doctors; if you have the time, I'd tell you about it), but it cannot solve everything for me.
Only I can do that. Only I can end this, and not in taking my own life. The only way to do that is to struggle, day to day like sisyphus with his boulder, climbing the hill to the top each day. Often times I don't reach the top. Sometimes I simply sit at the bottom, wondering at the purpose of this and clinging to the hope that there is one.
A part of me is filled with determination upon hearing that you, too, deal with this. Am I right?
Well, even if I'm not, you have a friend in me. and if am, I am willing to listen, to share. Misery loves company.
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