living and lying with pain
14 September 2019
Pain has always felt more valid than any other sensation in my body-mind, more true, more honest, so I find myself wanting to dwell on painful things to feel more real and present in my surroundings. While this is my reality and has been for all of my life, it is so damaging. It's a tendency that ultimately just invades and negates any room for pleasure, joy and vitality I can momentarily feel.
People label this "depression" or "anxiety," like it's something separate to my way of being and something faulty with my brain's wiring, a cloud of nonsense that is obstructing my "actual" perception. I have spent too many years waiting for it to resolve/dissolve, thinking that if I can find the right drugs, some treatment that will shift things a bit, then I would be able to be a more delightful human. One who can feel like a person with a bit of a passion and purpose sometimes. This has proven to be a lofty mythology in my life, an unproductive framing of my responses to the world.
I have gotten tired of being "a patient", inside a system that often sedates people, glorifies and stipulates "recovery" as if it's a real place people can reach. So in recent years, I keep trying to accept how my mind is, how my body is hypervigilant and sensitive to everything, how I sometimes wake up crying, exhausted and don't want to exist. I get up anyway, water my plants, do the dishes, and think about how much love and care I have around me, how extraordinary that is. I talk about anything else, most days, I can laugh and find things that soothe my state of being. I keep keeping on, in the knowledge that my pain is good at seeming more solid than anything else, even though it's not. It just destructively weighs me down and closes me off to enjoyment, to feel I can live well and function at a basic, manageable level, where I can feel the significance of whatever tiny thing I do, not just feeling everything is kind of pointless.
My poor, gate-crushed foot has prevented me from getting a good night's sleep for a fortnight, it's obviously really difficult, but ultimately, it's the same as my mind. Focusing on how I am more dependent on people, focusing on the pain, worrying about the weird nerve activity at night, panicking that it will never heal, doesn't encourage it to become stronger, it just needs to rest and be shown patience. Just another frustration to accept, validate and move with.
When things in my life seem to converge and mirror each other like this, I see how I create meaningful patterns out of the chaos, I really value that, it challenges me and propels me forward.