The student physician escorts me from the waiting room. She is smiling enough for four people. She asks me how I am and I compromise between her feelings and mine by claiming that I am 'making it'. Her smile trips and she looks overly concerned.

To her credit, all she says is, "making it is good." Had her response been any less kind or neutral or whatever it was, I might have broke just then,. Inside, I am asking how she can see patients all day and expect them to be having good days. My blood pressure is escalating.

I remind myself that not every patient feels as terribly as I do today, not every sick person feels like they should stay home from the doctor's.
I remind myself that I used to make appointments when I was feeling pretty ok.
I remind myself that there was a time before the pain fog.
I remind myself that just as I only barely remember "before" everyone else only barely imagines the fog.
I remind myself of all of those things two or three times, because I am forgetful today.

I borrow some of her extra smile and I try to forget everything I just tried to remember including the pain.

I have met regret and she looks an awful lot like me.

There are things that no one told me about being engaged. To be fair, I do not think a warning would have prepared me.

As promised, I have been invited onto an emotional roller coaster and I am clearly not the one driving. 

People told me that making a guest list is the hardest part. I think they meant because you want to invite everyone but can't or because you and your parents AND your fiance and your fiance's parents all have different ideas of how big of a wedding and who is important. This has not been my experience. Rather, I am finding that in the last 6 years, I have lost people who I thought would share this day. Best friends in high school, my grandfather, and even a few college friends. 

It is a new aspect of an old grief. My friends from high school have been the hardest. We dreamed up fantastic and purposeful lives for ourselves together. As I pass mile markers in my life that used to only exist in the future, I miss them. I want them to see how things turned out, to laugh at how wrong I was about some things mostly. To marvel that somehow this or that did not cause the end of the world. And I want to know where they are at in the process of becoming themselves. But, I do not know anything. Some of them, I do not even know what city they live in much less how to contact them. 

The dreams and the nightmares are the worst part. It is ridiculous, I know. But that guest list has brought up untold guilt that I did not know how to save that friendship, did not try harder, was not wiser or stronger or more patient...that I did not love them tenaciously enough. And that I could not protect them from the trauma none of us have ever recovered from. My two best friends were assaulted in high school. And it is as much a part of this world's curse that it didn't happen to me as that it did happen to them. What I mean is this, there is no reason why I survived high school unscathed and they didn't. People try to tell me that God protected me which just about boils my insides because I cannot understand why God would protect me and not them. All I can figure is that the curse of Eden is made complete in the injustice that falls with unequal weight on us. The fact that I am made alone by surviving and that I had to watch them shrink into themselves is another injustice in and of itself. It is the same curse, but it falls uniquely on each of us and often makes us believe that we alone are cursed or that we deserved it.

I thought I had grieved those years already. I thought I had forgiven myself and moved on. But for the last few nights I have dreamt of high school. I have relived things that I could not stop even the first time and I have loved good friends that I could not save only to wake and find it all long gone. The curse remains though. For the first time in my life, I have found something I regret enough to wish that I could talk to my younger self, touch her mouth and give her better words, let her look through the lens of my memory and see if she can't find the solution that escaped me. And so I dream. About the attackers. They stab me and, oddly enough, I recover better from that then from the dreams that come next. In them, I know I am dreaming. I am hanging out with my friends doing nothing in particular, but it is excruciating because I know it is not real. I cannot wake up but I cannot accept the dream. I don’t remember what happens in the dream, only the last scene before I finally open my eyes. When I wake up, we are all strangers who used to be friends and reality seems just a little bit cruel.

I have been living in a fog these past few days as I have tried to piece together why I am dreaming these dreams. The emotional weight that I awake with is immense. I feel old and worn out. It must be the guest list. The roll call of important people that should be. That and, I miss them.

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.

knots tied in between anger, boredom, and anxiety

Task (1): Meet the world each day somewhere between whatever terms it gives me and whatever terms I give it.

Task (2): Remain stress free.

Task (3): Try not to laugh/cry/scream at the combination of 1 and 2.

I have been mulling over how much of stress is a choice and how much of it just is. --As immovable, unalterable fact. It would seem that my body, and human bodies in general, were not made for stressing. They were not made for worry. They were not made for life to be so... hard. We are such fragile creatures for all of our bluffing and hoping and straining.

But how much of life being hard comes from our making it harder than it has to be?

I had a history teacher once who said that the purpose of history was to remind us that just because this is the way things are, does not mean that this is the way things should be or always have been. And ever since those words left his lips, they have followed me. He continued to explain that we need history to tell us that sometimes we need to fight and sometimes fighting is ugly. More than that, sometimes the way things are is, quite simply, wrong; and when it is wrong, we are not powerless. We are not restrained to a passive watching of the world, our world.

Those words have made me bold on more than one account in the years since. Lately, however, I have been really good at refusing to apply this idea. I am not so much the humanist that I can believe that a man's or woman's destiny is in their own hands entirely; but I do believe that the many of us spend too much time reacting to a life that appears to just happen. We are not as powerless as we often feel. We can take responsibility for more than we realize.

Those are dangerous beliefs. They are heavy and ready to add their own layer of chaos to the pile of things worth stressing about. And up until now, I have "turned a blind eye". Yet, I feel it is time to apply the process to the process itself... if that makes sense.

Because apparently, handling stress well is not merely refusing to let things bother you by forcing them into unsee-ably dark corners of yourself. And it is more than cheap denial or delayed reactions. It is not storing it for later to be dealt with when no one else is around. Apparently. Which sucks because...well, I am so good at those. Or I was.

Until my body rebelled. Treason. I had done the hard work of persuasion. Mutiny from the inside.

Now, it turns out, I am not meant to house and store things for later and 'not now'. I am learning to be more intentional about letting things go. Which is strange, because I swear that that is exactly the opposite of taking responsibility and meeting life on its terms and not just being a victim of passive reaction. Yet, it takes so much more effort to say (in a way that my body actually believes), "This is not worth the pain I will feel if I hold onto this one second more."

It is letting go of my right to feel incensed, annoyed, piteous etc. But it is not denying myself emotions, because that also I feel in this seditious wreck. Instead, it is the highest honesty of feeling everything as it comes without letting it rule me. I have never been so aware of my own thoughts or how little true self-control I have. More often than not, it seems an impossible balance to strike; but I guess it is just a more mature version of choosing to feel. To feel without shutting down or being consumed by emotion. To feel emotions in wisdom, if that is possible (and I do not yet know if I believe it to be).

So here I am. Open window blowing peaceful wind across my typing fingers as I try to figure out why I hurt today. All I can figure is that I am pushing myself too hard this week and  my body is too tired to filter out the stressors. I was not always this fragile. But I did love my strength.




Also, art. I have very much enjoyed this photographer over the last few days.

ruby

I have long berated emotions for being inefficient, and for nearly that same amount of time I have wondered what real purpose they serve. They are a large part of why I do not really believe in macro-evolution. Emotions do not aid the survival of the fittest mentality, stereotypical or not. They are deceptive and impractical more often than not.

It was easy to come up with half-answers that were never satisfying, but were enough to pacify. Things like, "they are what make us human" or "to keep us from being fake" and other explanations were in no way false...but they did not seem to be solid defense.

Maybe what I have found will only pacify any other person, but it is the answer I have found satisfaction in. Emotions force us to need the people around us. They make life about more than just getting by on our own and totally destroy the lone ranger. People are not made to be alone and we feel it more than the most perfect empirical science. This life thing, whatever else it is, is dependent on other people. We can take on other people's pain in a way that is uniquely human, even if we do not know them.

Feeling is what binds us together. And it is pain and happiness...and both of those in strange and unexpected mixtures. We need people to help us heal. We need people we can trust to help us be who we were made to...It does not work any other way. There are no exceptions or loopholes. It is horrible and dangerous and painfully clumsy work because none of us know what we are doing. More than that, we wont know what we are doing until we have done it, probably wrong, at least once. All of us clueless people trying to make sense of what we have been given. But it is poetry, or art, or music...and we cannot stop to consider our audience or we will never finish. Because if we lose ourselves to the rules of beauty that other people make we will never wade through those tears or walk deep enough into unknown darkness to feel the weight of the worth of what we are making.

Quite simply, we are making ourselves a life.

perwinkle

A few years ago, I looked at various pieces of prose I had written and I realized how much pain there was. I wanted so badly to write something different, but every time I wrote it came out the same--or worse, it sounded forced. It is only now that I see how dark a time I was living in my life. Having come out of that time, I see that I longed to write about what I did not know. I could not write with the honesty I desired when my desired subject simply was not my reality.

I had been asked why I thought it was that it is easier to find dark poetry that is good. I did not have a real answer then. Maybe I do now. It is likely to be because pain forces us to be real. Humanity is seldom happy long enough to record it and deep enough to communicate it genuinely and deeply. It is a world at war, and, when we are honest, we cannot pretend any differently. We all carry our weapons beside our wounds in one form or another. Even those who find true joy, cannot honestly deny the evidence of an inherited curse. It weighs on us all, but it is not eternal.