No. 18
YOUR feeling
I’VE BEEN TRYING TO WRITE THIS SINCE MARCH SIXTH…
“This,” being an essay about pain.
I’ve been trying to confront pain since the fall.
I’ve been trying to understand pain for four years.
I’ve been in pain my whole life. Haven’t we all?
We start our lives in tears — screaming in anguish.
I was going to tell a story about what it feels like to wait for the train to take me home every night. I was going to call this one, “Your Baby” and use pregnancy and birth giving as a metaphor for coping with pain but I can’t do that anymore and I’ll tell you the reason why.
I am an artist. Born one or grown to be one, I’m still not sure. When the wind blows, I hear music. I physically react to colors and for me, nothing can exist if it doesn’t tell a story. I think in metaphor and my eyes only see symbols.
The pain I feel is so unique and foreign, every metaphor has failed to help me make sense of what is senseless. I can’t find a symbol that perfectly captures my discomfort enough to alleviate it. I try and I’ve tried but I’ve been led to the same place over and over. Hurting so badly I can’t move. That’s because pain is pain. It does not matter if you compare it to waiting for a train or giving birth to it and holding it like a baby.
Did it help to imagine myself cradling everything that hurt me as if it were my newborn child?
Yes. It evoked tenderness and compassion and patience and understanding.
Did it make everything stop hurting?
No. It’s not supposed to.
Supplementing human emotion for metaphors is like planning to do something instead of doing it. Both actions are important, but one you can only see, and the other, you can see and touch. Somewhere along the way, I guess I decided to experiment with seeing and not touching. With thinking and not feeling. Before I let myself feel the pain, the artist in me tried to make art out of it … in efforts to not feel any pain at all. An impractical and maybe even impossible task.
And in efforts to avoid vulnerability, I was going to use a metaphor to indirectly explain how I’m healing. I’ve made friends with avoidance and indirectness and in my choosing to deny what is literal and what is fact — in choosing only abstraction, I have chosen war, and in a world where so much conflict and struggle exist, why have I also chosen to fight?
Lady Gaga’s version of version of La Vie En Rose once saved my life. I would listen to it daily and on repeat — without conscious understanding of what the lyrics were or meant. At this time in my life, I had met pain for what felt like the first time. I came to realize how paralyzing it was — how frozen and in touch with the way I must have felt when I crossed over from womb to world. Screaming in anguish yet again. Though I didn’t know what the song was saying, I didn’t need to. All I knew is that it made me feel. There’s no language barrier when you’re in pain. Your heart understands just fine. My heart understood what my mind did not:
A broken heart must be felt.
Failed love is not the only reason a heart breaks. There is also change, misunderstanding, loss, disappointment, shock, fear, lack of expression, too much darkness, and dishonesty to consider. When you are in pain and when you’re hurting, I implore you to feel it, my friend. It is a brave thing to do. Do not try to rationalize or irrationalize. Do not try to force it away. Make room for it. Make the most room for it. Hold it. It is in doing this that you take away its power to consume and swallow.
Does this mean you will immediately stop hurting?
Perhaps, but probably not.
You may always hurt. But you won’t be broken. It will not kill you.
To feel is the reason we’re here. Feeling is how we move.
