Pain

"People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” (Jim Morrison)

I noticed pain first in the waiting room. That’s when I felt it like a presence. Like a looming cloud over our heads, waiting to pour down chicken-egg-sized hail on us … Menacing. Not hitting us yet. But there.

With every door that opened, my heart jumped. I was hoping that when every door opened it will let Hope and Life burst out and we’ll be free from the heavy cloud. That he’ll be free from the heavy cloud.

But with every door, and with every doctor and nurse that passed, the knife was being pressed even deeper into my heart! No Hope. No Life. Just waiting. Endless waiting and pain, more pain. I could see the tunnel of what I was being shoved into now deeper, even deeper, with every carefree doctor that passed by. Torture. Hours feeling like days, months …

Herodotus says that “The worst pain a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing”. It’s how it is: you FEEL all these things abusing you, all your pores are open and you take in malicious things that shoot sharp knifes up your nerve endings and you feel, and you are aware, no enhancers necessary, but there is nothing to stop the afflux of “too much” information from the outside sad news. You’re powerless. You sit. And wait. And take it all as it comes. And pray that your body has the innate immunity to block some of this. And most times, it feels like it doesn’t.

Emotional pain is tricky. You can’t quite describe it. You can’t quite locate it and for sure you can’t quite take Tylenol for it. It’s there, all-encompassing your whole being, , and it’s worse than whatever pain you’ve ever felt, but there is no way to “handle” it.

You hang, feeling it, maybe the most in your chest, between despair and blasphemy and you just demand “justice” and “cure”. But there is nothing in sight.

Emotional pain is the only kind of pain that you just have to “put up with”. You go through it and you keep going. I think Churchill said that “when you find yourself walking through hell, keep walking”. That’s ALL you CAN do through horrible emotional pain. You’ve already lost the war, and it’s pouring ashes and snow, and you’re naked, stripped off the skin you had left, and alone in the field, with the blizzard whipping. And you know, that somehow, in all this madness, you’ll live. You know, somehow, that THIS is necessary and you WILL be ok. But you can’t avoid it. You have to be there, be present. Embrace it, even. It’s part of what will make you-you.

You’re not sure how long it’ll take for this thing to do its thing with you. You pray and you walk, and you burn, and you cry, and you hope … that somehow, you’ll come out of this.

Somehow, at the end of some day, you’ll be left stripped to the bone, and helpless and naked, and alone. And somehow, you’ll stand up and walk away back in the “normal” realm, where everything is warm, and tender, and cozy. Bruised, scarred and lifeless, you will stand up and walk. You’ll never be the same person, but this was necessary! To test the skies, and to test you, this was part of the daily routine we call “life”.

But till then, you bleed in the snow, and the wind and the hail of too much emotion thrown your way. You curse God and you don’t mean to. But who else IS there to blame or listen? Who else is capable of giving us so much pain?! You have questions like these and more, but they are called into the desert. You wait. And you pray. And you cry. And most of anything: you bow, and you’re humble and you’re hoping the sooner you take all that’s given to you the faster the healing will begin. But where does the abusing stop?! How can you tell? You can’t.

Just wait. And pray. And trust!