On pain and waves

Thursday 2 October 

It comes in waves. Expect waves, waves of pain, of deep sadness, of joy. You'll not see them coming and they will knock you out. Those mornings or hours in the day you feel normal, you don't think about it will surprise you - it's too good to believe that the pain is gone, you know it rationally and the realisation brings it back. The yoga teacher reminded me : the job of the mind is to produce, that of the heart is to feel. I'm at a loss because I feel that I need to process this, to understand it somehow, not to run away from it, to take my time with it; yet it feels so good when I can't feel my heart. Since it all started, I can FEEL my heart and it's heavy and it gives me a nauseating sensation.

I haven't come to a conclusion on this and the only word of advice is when it gets too heavy, take a breath, stop, say I love you, cry and find something to do. It will oppose you and generally people say take your time but the more time you spend there the worse it gets. I am writing this in a moment of calm, in one of those good hours. And I think of children - they are often the ones who feel more pain than we will ever remember having felt , but their capacity to heal is endless. Is it because they are so eager to learn, explore, experience? Or is it just that they haven't learned the words to fully describe how bad it hurts? 

Do we amplify our own pain? When you cut yourself it only starts hurting when you look at it - that's the general consensus and I experienced the phenomenon. When I was in car crash a few years ago, I banged my head on the wind shield, cracked it open and felt nothing. The surprise of the incident, the incredibly short amount of time for such in intricate sequence of events and sensations to happen to my mind and body simply overloaded my circuits. I did start to have some headaches after the accident. But that's physical pain - you can re-live the incident in your head as many times as you like - it will never hurt again. 

The images that tormented me, or rather, I tormented myself with were that of  him in that car, alone, the moment of realisation he was going to collide and him getting crushed. My heart would tear violently, as if it were cut but a butcher's knife, in a steady, harsh, decisive cut. With my mother, it was the image of her feeling that one sharp pain that shook her entire body and the words my dad said she had uttered - my head really hurts . I kept playing the words and images in my head those first few days, knowing what they would do to me. I kept playing over in my head the phone call I got from my father on that Wednesday afternoon a year ago - your mother is in a coma and the doctors aren't giving us any hope  ( shy of one day), as well as the words that his friend said to me that Friday afternoon - Scott's been killed . Such harsh words, so definitive and cruel, but they fade comparison to reality. 

I find myself drifting back to bargaining - with my mother, I can now remember there was some - it lasted for the three days she spent in hospital, on life support. I remember going to the nurses and the doctor, with tears in my eyes and a praying look, a desperate but also hopeful look, asking them to tell me the truth about her. They would look back at me, that compassionate look that tells you it's not going to be what you want to hear - the doctor would say there is no hope of recovery and even on the off-chance her heart would start beating again and her lungs start pumping, her brain is a paste now. He would ask me to imagine the brain, with all the synapses, the shape it has, how it's tied together and then imagine my mum's is now mush. Still, for those three days, I hoped and when I started hearing my father plead, asking for her back, in any state, I realised I must start hoping she would die..and soon. With Scott, everything was straightforward and I was grateful.

I think about the pain I felt after my failed love stories ( two relevant ones before him), the pain I felt after losing my mother, even the pain I felt watching movies like Blue Valentine or P.S I Love you is THE SAME. It feels the same. It's equally sharp, your rib cage gets so tight that you feel like you will implode. What is different is the coordinates - the time it goes on for, the disruption in your life, the collateral damage it brings, the recovery time. Once again I realise, I have to accept I will hurt like this again and most likely, it will be caused by something much less tragic and when it comes to pain, well, there is no rock bottom.

Note to self : the emotions we go through are our own, we feel them, we live through them and there are no degrees of comparison. Scott's death hurts me as much as the loss of a pet, the falling out with a friend, the disillusionment with life or oneself.
As difficult this is to understand, both rationally and emotionally, I see how petty it is to underrate the pain of others, how unfair and cruel and while doing so is a natural reaction, justifiable to some extent ( we're human and deal in measurements, evaluations, comparisons), I can't help but think: when I'm happy I don't need anyone to be happy with me, to validate and augment my states of elation ... what entitles me to it when I'm not?