Pain (physical AND mental) is a funny thing... for a few reasons.
Reason the first: it is distracting. We desperately seek the moment of not feeling pain, but homeostasis is cruel. It denies us of noticing when it is achieved. I remember many a pain where I looked at the ceiling, imagining the minute that it went away. In my fantasy, I smiled softly, relieved that the pain was gone. But I never notice. Half an hour after the pain fades, I'm like OH... it's gone. I feel a guilt that I didn't show gratitude in that moment. In my (an everyone else's) defense, we evolved to notice negative things with about 10 times more intensity than a good thing. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you see see a pretty, yet harmless bird and a venomous spider, it is more pragmatic to remember where the danger lies so you can avoid it. It's annoying though. Nowadays the spiders and the lions and the hyenas take a diferent form. A form that cannot kill us. Yet... they still make our bodies react as if they could. My 3AM wakeups, those moments of sheer panic where my heart want to jump out of my chest are more bcause I fucked up with something or processed something too slowly, or hurt someone or let someone hurt me. I will not die because I said a dumbass thing, but my pesky nervous system begs to differ!
Ok, ok, reason the second. Pain fills spaces. It takes time and energy and it paralyzes. When we are in pain, we allocate our energy to holding that pain, trying to understand it. We think want it gone, but sometimes lean into it too. We stop living because of its invasiveness. We learn to live with pain, to notice those bad things, to embrace trauma. Trauma happens when the bad things we experience become embedded into our identity, reliably rearing its head when triggered. Trauma and pain fills out our hollows. The more the years pass, the harder it is to know how to fill those spaces with light and the harder it is to notice the life's little blessings.
Lately especially I have felt hollow. I pace around, hungry for something. I end up reaching to my traumas, trying to revisit the scene of every crime that made me a mess. The emptiness wants me to go back because no matter how people want to romantisize mental health issues, healing is not magical. We often return to pain for fear of the hollow. One doesn't heal today and have a guarantee that the path is forward always. You don't say fuck this and I will be better and have it work instantly and reliably. Life continues around us, and our triggers will have the temerity to continue to happen. Triggers are like toddlers, smiling at us and looking at us in the eye, whilst provoking us. Trauma knows that any kind of attention will feed it better than no attention at all.
I guess that emptiness is good in its own way. It is the blank notebook, the unknit yarn, the unsewn fabric. Lately I've been holding the emtiness in my palm, gazing at it and wondering what things I can fill it with. Make zokin with lefover cloth and colorful threads? Fill a fountain pen with ink as deep a blue as the midnight sky? Create a new tea blend to drink or mix fragrant oil for my skin? Dance? Write? I just hope that one day I can be wiser and learn that leaning into the fear of the hollow spaces is better than the needless pain of leaning into my trauma. I often hate the chasm between knowing the thing, and living the thing.
Screamin' feed me here
Fill me up again
Temporarily
Pacifyin'
Feed me here
Fill me up again
Temporarily
Pacifyin'
– A Perfect Circle (The Hollow)