control and oblivion

As of November 1st, I started keeping a journal of pain. I do not know what else to call it. The journal is not for emotional pain or psychological pain. Just physical pain (unless I have reason to believe that they are tied together). It has started to worry me how many of my hours and even days I give away to pain but I hardly keep track.

I am so busy running to the next day hoping to feel ok then, to feel like a functioning individual, to feel human and then trying my hardest to dwell there for as long as possible and forget the grinding of gears, the shorting of circuitry, and the complaining of parts desperately in need of maintenance that I do not know how to give...that I am quite certain that I am missing something.

This is my attempt to take a step back. To live less in survival. To stop swinging from 'things will never get better' to 'I hope this never leaves'. Because things will get better and then the better will leave and life will keep on living.

I need to be careful, though, not to fixate on my pain as I write it down. I need to not make any goals as I study myself. Because I cannot tap into another source of stress. This is more about honesty and remembering things which I have hitherto tried my best to forget because I do not want to have the answers available for myself much less for the people around me. I do not want to feel broken and I do not want anyone else to know that I am. But I do. And I am sure that they do.

And I guess in some way this is my attempt at reclaiming my life. Maybe a journal is progress... and maybe it is just there to make me feel like things are moving forwardly... like I am allowed to move forward... like I am not choosing blindness as I move on. I cannot be bound much longer to the constant stopping and starting of life; and I cannot keep making my life about how well my body is cooperating with my intentions. At some point, I have to stop caring about all of that and get to living.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." ~Oscar Wilde

So I will let the paper do the caring, let my ink pay attention; but as for my life... it will not be found mapped out on paper and it will not be confined to the days when I feel like it. I have already allowed too much of pain to dictate who I will be on a given day. It is so easy to do.

My pain journal, in a way, is a confession and hopefully my repentance. If I am honest enough about the pain, if I let it in, if I stop ignoring it... I think it will not fight so hard to be heard. In a way, by giving it a voice, I hope to free up more life for actually living. And that really is all I can ask for at the end of the day: I want to be allowed to live. Everything else after that is peripheral. Descriptors and clauses. Commentary and opinion.