Pain.

Pardon my lazy title today. I often take pride in the titles I come up with but what I wanna write about today is too important to me for me to care about what I call the post. I want to talk about pain and what I’ve come to understand about it in my short but also awfully long time with it.

I’ve played out all the different scenarios in which my boyfriend is still alive but he’s always still dead at the end so I’m now trying to forge a new path for myself with his passing as my departure point. I mean. He’s dead. That was a defining moment for me. He’ll never not be dead. So I have to work with facts here. I’ve reached the painful point where fantasies just don’t cut it anymore.

Pain is so intimate and so unique to each of us. I am painfully aware of the fact that no one, not even my mother, can bear this pain for me. It is mine. Fashioned to fit only my form. It’s isolating in how only I can feel it the way I do. I feel trapped in my body with this unwelcome stranger.

I cry most nights and that still doesn’t make the pain any less. It’s just something I live with now. I’m also done fighting it. It is relentless. John Green knew exactly what he was talking about when he said pain DEMANDS to be felt.

I can’t pray it away, sleep it away, cry it away or eat it away. Wherever I am there it is also. I have submitted myself to it. It’s a path only I can take cos it’s been designed specifically for me. And that’s the thing about pain. It ALWAYS comes bearing our names on it. It never misses. If it’s aimed at you it will find you.

I feel like pain is also a teacher. I’m not quite sure of its lessons yet but I know most of them have to do with acceptance and surrender. When I stopped fighting it it started shaping me into someone else. Someone new. Someone who survived the loss of the love of her life. Prior to this I’d never met this person. Only pain could drag her out.

I’m observing this pain with curiosity and wonder. Letting it have its way with me cos it was always meant to make its home in me, only I didn’t know then. My curiosity is one of the things that have kept me alive. I’m curious to know who I become when this pain has had its way with me. I’m curious to know just how resilient my spirit is. I’ve always insisted that there’s nothing more resilient than the human spirit. Life will always come to collect what’s due to it. I’ve spent my whole life professing that there is nothing more resilient than the human spirit and here is my spirit being tested in full view of the world. I really have nowhere to hide from this pain.

Language is failing me here. I can’t explain some facets of this pain. But I observe it with wonder. I’m being stretched beyond what I thought was possible. There is a force within me that keeps pushing me to wake up each morning in spite of the pain.

I can’t numb it. There’s no anaesthesia for this kind of pain. You go through it conscious and fully sober. I’m not some strong person who just woke up and decided she would face her pain head on. It left me with no other choice really but to just sit with it. Cheryl Strayed puts it nicely, “Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

This room is terribly small and awfully quiet. I am in it all by myself. Not because no one would jump in to save me but because no one could even if they tried. I have to walk through it, live through it and maybe live to tell about it.

I feel like I have a gaping wound in my chest. Not even my imagination could have stretched wide enough to imagine all of this. And that’s what makes me even more curious. You don’t know pain until it finds you. And it will always find you when it’s your time.

I’m so intrigued by all of this. How I’m able to breathe and have blood circulate throughout my body when it feels like I’m bleeding from the inside.

Pain. What a wonder. How it can quietly shape someone into a completely different person without drawing any attention to itself. What a thing!