Pain, hope, and the co-existence of the two

The past 6 weeks of my life have revolved around a singular focus: pain.  
(Or rather, its elimination.)

It's the first thing there when I open my eyes, the last thing I try to push out of my brain as I lay there pleading for sleep to take me out, and my constant companion throughout each and every day.

After 5 years of dealing with a chronic right hip/sciatic/SI joint condition, I'm no stranger to pain.  But right around Christmas I hurt my back, and have now been dealing with muscle spasms and left hip pain on top of the "usual" pain I've grown accustomed to living with.   

Most people would never know that I'm dealing with it on a daily basis.  You know those life-sucking vultures who latch onto every ear they can find and whine about every ache and pain?  Or the giant babies who become incapacitated by a mere headache?

Well, I can't stand them, and I have no desire to join their ranks.  There are a lot of people out there suffering quietly and doing their best to cope, rather than exploiting their ailments for attention and sympathy.  By no means is either category of person braver, more valiant, or superior to the other....I just don't see the point in complaining.  

But this post isn't about those people, and it isn't really about my problem, either.  It's about figuring out how to hold onto some tiny shred of hope when you're in the trenches with it.  

When there's nothing there but you and the pain.  When you can't escape it, because it IS you.  

When you've tried it all, and exhausted the treatment options, and still it remains...what's next?  

When every step forward is followed by two steps back, where do you look for hope?  

When you're the one you can't fix...what then?



I've had my moments here lately.  Moments when I just can't see it.  Moments when I just want to give up, regress into the emotional fetal position, and dissolve into self-pity and helplessness.

Waking up in the middle of the night in pain and bawling for an hour straight.

Crying at my physical therapist's office.  

It wasn't so much that one setback after weeks of gradual improvement; it was one more setback.  One more setback on top of the hundred others.  The ups, the downs, the times when you think you're finally on your way to getting better, only to wind up back where you started.  It gets that much harder each and every time you have to drag yourself back up to fight another fight.  

I should be a fucking professional at this by now.  After all the days and weeks and years where I thought about killing myself every single blessed day, I should have the answer to pain.  

But as my friend Therese at The Unlost reminds us, 

"All of life, it seems,
is a process:
A process of un-learning and re-learning,
forgetting and remembering,
slumbering and waking up,
again,
and again,
and again."

So I'm trying my best to remember how to keep getting up out of bed, and keep looking for ways to cope, and keep not giving up.  Because I don't get a choice.  No one asked me if I wanted this pain.  It just is.  And I have to work with it, and breathe with it, and lie with it, and if it never gets better, maybe even die with it.  

Since I can't escape from it, shouldn't I have stopped trying to by now?

Whether the pain you're dealing with is physical or emotional, there is really only one thing to do: sit with it.

"And so you sit with that feeling; you let it in.  As much as you can bear it, you let it be.  For a moment it encompasses you like you feared it would...but still you let it stay, even when every fiber of your being wants  to run like hell...

And although the feeling is still there, it becomes smaller, less encompassing, less real.  And you start to realize that it's not so life-ending, after all."

-Therese, The Unlost

Depression: The Invisible Prison

I used to wish for cancer. 

Pray for it, even, which is a backwards thing for an agnostic to do...but then, no godly person could get away with praying for death. 

I would hear these stories of wonderful, beloved people being robbed of their futures, happily-ever-after with their partners, the chance to see their children grow up....
...and you know what I felt? Envy. 

I was jealous that these people got a free ticket out of this house of horrors - and didn't even WANT it - while I was being forced to stay against my will. 

I know; sickening.

And because it's such a twisted and disgusting thought process, I would feel immense guilt over it. I was ashamed to be frittering away my existence with suffering, while others who actually *wanted* their lives and their family and their friends - who could actually enjoy being here - would not be allowed to stay.   

The guilt may have had less to do with my perverse death wish than the fact that I was not living the life I had been given; I was wasting it.

One day after the next, I wallowed in the cesspool of depression, rejecting life. I would walk by this poem I had pasted on my fridge: "I Will Not Die an Unlived Life" and feel horrible about how horrible my life was, because that is a depressed brain does.

I was reminded of all of this today when reading a paradoxical post by Adam Alvarado at The Last Broken Home: What a [Death Row Inmate] Can Teach You About Being Yourself -

"We can piss away one more day being angry, and vengeful, and sad – about crap that’s gone by, and passed by, and no longer a part of ourselves or our future. Another day being afraid of so much, and hurt by so much, and less than our better selves because of it."

Isn't that exactly what I did for 5 years?

I may as well have been in prison. 

Hell, there IS no worse prison than our own minds. We sit there suffering day after day, waiting for someone to come let us out...only to find out one day that the door was never even locked.

A friend of mine once blogged at "The Invisible Prison" (which she has since taken down, much to my dismay). There couldn't be a more fitting metaphor for suicidal depression. From the outside, no one can glean any possible reason for this self-imposed sentence. There are no bars, no chains, no guards...

...yet we're not so much afraid that door will never open; we're afraid that it WILL, and we'll have to face the world once again.

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Life is pain, and other life lessons from House.

"LIFE is pain!  I wake up every morning, I'm in pain.  I go to work in pain.  You know how many times I wanted to just give up, how many times I've thought about ending it?"  -- Dr. Gregory House

It's not common for me to cry when I watch House, but something about that scene last Monday shook me in its familiarity.  I've had that rage for the greater part of four years.  Truly, you don't know what pain will do to you until it seizes hold of your life. 

But what enrages House in this scene is not his own despair, rather the notion that his cancer-stricken best friend is entitled to resign himself to death.  Which begs the question, whose life is it?  Do we owe our suffering to the people around us, if it means they can keep us around for their own benefit? 

There are certainly days (and weeks, and years) that I wasn't sticking around for my own sake, which implies that a part of me DOES feel obligated to endure my own circumstances to prevent the heartbreak of my loved ones.  Intellectually, however, I'm not sure that we owe anybody anything. 

The show's upcoming termination sucks.  Our society needed his character.  The endless drip of self-affirmative "Think Positive" -esque books and shows and slogans has dulled us into fake-a** shells.  Seems kind of backwards that ultra-positivity is cultivating sickness.  We don't even know WHAT we feel anymore, because we're not ALLOWED to feel it.  Give me some cynicism, sarcasm, and pessimism any day over plastered-on smiles. 

I remember when Jon Stewart had Barbara Ehrenreich on The Daily Show to discuss her book, "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America."  Ehrenreich scoffs at how you can't even get away with 'negativity' if you have cancer ... it's so true!  People will demand hope of you, with an insistence that you don't wallow, but rather remain ever-optimistic, with a mind-over-matter mentality.  So really, your average, ordinary breed of daily whining is intolerable. 

I know I definitely feel that my actual emotions are not acceptable to others.  If they were, I probably wouldn't have to write them here.  I probably wouldn't have to write a blog about suicide, because I probably wouldn't have become suicidal in the first place.  And I probably wouldn't have to write, period, because society would instead endorse open communication that accepts, rather than denies, all that is part of the human experience.   

Unrelaxing relaxation.

I went for myofascial release today. 

Periodically my hip gets so bad that I nearly go berserk.  Then I google and research and strategize what I will attempt next to make the pain go away. 

So for various reasons I am running late to get to this appointment that is twice as far of a drive as I had allowed for.  Rushing to go relax, I thought to myself.  Makes a lot of sense. 

Because I am late, she forgoes the 2-minute clothing removal and does the MFR with my clothes on.  On any other day I would’ve thrown on yoga pants or something comfy, but no, toDAY I wear jeans.  Awesome. 

We can’t start on my hip right away because my sacrum is tilted out of whack, so we start with spinal decompression.  Have I ever injured my tailbone?  Why yes.  Yes I have. 

I knew I should have gone to the chiropractor first.  I scold myself for another failure.  I am annoyed that I always do the same crap, that I am always late, that I am supposed to be relaxing but my jeans aren’t very bendy and the whole thing is the opposite of the slow, gentle healing it is intended to be.  I wonder why I ever leave the house. 

She works on my jaw next.  I try to put aside my OCD issue about people touching my face in hopes that my TMJ will be alleviated, but mostly I think about my pores getting clogged and the breakouts I will wake up to tomorrow.

On the drive home I call to see if there are massage openings at this other place I go to sometimes.  In 25 minutes...perfect.  I squeeze in an adjustment since the chiro’s in the same building and, after all, why do another treatment when everything’s in the wrong place?  More scurrying around. 

For the massage I go bare.  Well technically, first I get on the table with my panties and my dignity in place, then I decide it will just make it awkward for her to access all the hip and glute muscles that have aching trigger points.  Sigh. 

Facedown with my head in the little circle, I fail to close my eyes soon enough and have to ponder the handwritten “grandpa” tattoo on her feet, along with her french-tipped toes.  She starts with my legs, and I anger at the stretch marks in places that weren’t there a couple of years ago.  I beat myself up over a few hundred more things. I panic at the slight breeze in my nethers, where a properly-tucked massage sheet normally should be shielding.  Oh, well.  Look at my privates.  See if I care. 

I tell myself that even fat people deserve massages as I internally apologize to the girl for having to squeegee across my fat rolls and dimples and stretch marks.  I contemplate the vulnerability of baring one’s ugliness to a complete stranger, who - truth be told - doesn't really have much of a say.  I wonder about the stories these people could tell of the bodies they have to look at.  The possibility, not the promise, of being in slightly less pain allows me to surrender to this humiliation. 

Accompanying me as always, the despair lingering beneath the surface.  This is my body I’ve destroyed that I don’t want anyone to ever see again, this body that nobody (save a massage therapist or doctor) has touched in years and maybe never will again.  This is my pain that may never go away that has ruined my life and my hope and my health.  This is my summation of failures in the world and the reason I don’t want to be with myself, much less someone else.  

The Un-Life

Right now I am living the opposite of anything that could possibly resemble a life.  

An existence creeping far too slowly towards death, perhaps.  But a life?  No.  

My eyes are open twelve hours a day.  I try; I fail.  I try harder; I still fail.   

On most days, it seems the best is all in the past (“best” being a misnomer, because nothing I had was worth keeping).

Someone loved me.  Once. 

I had a career.  Once.

I was great at some things.  Once. 

Now I am nobody doing nothing headed: nowhere.

Most of the time, it feels as though I’m never going to make it back “in.”  Whatever that means. 

I’m terrified every moment of every day that I don’t have what it takes to do this.

I used to be the naive fool who believed if you just work hard enough, you can get what you want. 

The way the world actually works is: you can try to do it all right and still wind up with nothing.

Or, as House aptly summarized, “People don’t get what they deserve, they just get what they get.”

“Anytime you need a friend....

I will be here...”  So sings Mariah Carey. 

But some words are only true in a song.

“A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.”

Maybe those are the kind of friendships other people have.

Lucky bastards.

In the real world, you don’t always get back what you give. 

“Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.” -Albert Camus

In my life’s darkest times, no one has “shown up” for me. 

If I wanted to hit the bars, there are a bazillion people, friends-cousins-acquaintances, I could call up.

If I wanted ditzy bimbo friends to gossip with about who’s sleeping with who, I could go be another dime-a-dozen trollop down at the bar all hoed up with my group of girls. 

But when your life’s falling apart:

• Do you call the friend who’s not there for the little things to be there for the big things?
• Who can’t be burdened for an hour lunch...for a life crisis?
• Should you unload on someone too busy to post back on Facebook, much less reply to an e-mail?

My so-called “best friends” have known about all the major losses in these past several years of my life ... and not bothered to call or see how I’m doing, or even if I’m alive or dead. 

“Everyone hears what you say. Friends listen to what you say. Best friends listen to what you don't say.”

For a time you continue to reach out anyway, to act normal, hiding your pain so as not to be a burden.  You try to be the kind of friend you wish you had, until that nagging question in the back of your mind one day leaps to the forefront: where WERE you?

Where were you when life was kicking my ass?

When I couldn't get out of bed?

When I had no one?

I didn’t even show you the darkness, I pretended for you...wasn’t I a good enough actor?

I know, I know: it’s always more fun to knock back a few margaritas with the happy, laughing bunch.

Failure might be contagious.  Despair is catching. 

And I...am a leper? 

So before you shut me out completely, best friend, I will throw you out along with the rest of the world. 

I never wanted you to feel sorry for me.  I didn’t need your pity.  I did need to look in your eyes and see that I was the same person you called “friend” before this bulldozer ran over my life. 

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." ~Henri Nouwen 

"But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one's deepest as well as one's most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away." ~Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tidings of (no) comfort and (lack of) joy...

It’s been a hard day. A hard week. And it’s not over yet.


2 more days of Christmas. One more week of holidays. One more year to kiss goodbye in which I didn’t “pull myself up by the bootstraps” and “get back on the horse” and “take the bull by the horns” and all those other bullsh*t anti-motivators that mysteriously haven’t rescued me from my chosen (right?) anguish.


Yeah, it’s one of those days. There’s no place to go, no book to read, no show to watch, no project to undertake ... that could sufficiently distract me from the pain that I’m feeling.


If I were a drug addict, I’d be high as a kite right now, but I’m too chickensh*t to go that hardcore.


So I sit with it.


Despair creeps in through the cracks, the same ones hope is seeping out of.


It might have something to do with the seventy-ninth (if I want to exaggerate I’ll f***ing exaggerate) job I couldn’t make it at, and the ensuing disgust with myself for adding to my quit-list this week.


It might have something to do with my refusal to participate in family events this holiday season, and my rejection of *things* in place of love.


You aren’t supposed to be weary at 30, are you? I mean, really. I’m not talking about exhaustion; that was 5 years ago when I was 25 going on 40, dead weight dragging through the days.


I’m weary of 1-being me and 2-hating me.


I’m weary of life, and the suffocating alienation of being unseen. And yet, in premise, invisibility sounds so liberating...


I’m weary of reaching out to people who don’t reach back, though I know it is my very nature to give the most to people who are incapable of giving another human being what they need.


I’m tired of people who don’t try, who don’t change, who don’t care. They drain my soul.


I’M tired of trying, of changing mySELF, of caring. It drains my soul even more.


I’m tired of the questions-
The demands-
The requirements of life-
Where will I go and what will I do and who will I be and what is the point?


Yeah. Weary.


“Tonight at the end of light
Tonight I feel lonely
I thought I heard my heart stop beating
I long for you to hold me.”





An Alli Rogers song creeps in (and I’m not even a Christian for cripes sake). 
I could go cry in the back pew of a raggedy church. 
I could thrown myself down in the aisle and scream, “Why?” to a god I don’t believe in.


I guess we all have the same questions, and the lucky ones are able to find solace in someone else’s answers.


But when there’s no comfort in faith, in friends, in family, in love ... is there any true comfort to be found at all?


Or just emptiness...