On Pain

Thoughts of the small hours

Sometimes I think, maybe it would be better to lose everything. Because when you’ve lost everything - really and truly everything - it must narrow your options down into a marvellously relaxing clarity. It would be a comfort, I think, to know that you have no choice, that you have but one course of action…even if that one course of action is self-annihilation. To know, for sure and certain, that whatever terrible thing you’re about to do is the only thing left: maybe that would be better.

But to lose, not everything, but something so large and so vital to yourself that on a bad day it feels like everything and on a good day it feels like you should be ashamed of yourself for even daring to have a good day…well that is no fun at all.

There is so much in my life that brings joy. Love, and laughter, and beauty, and the bright shining promise of a future where I can continue experiencing this world. I’m grateful for it all, and I hate it all. As my mind spins like a magic lantern I burst with optimism for what’s ahead, and shrivel with despair at how little it all means.

It is loss. Loss that grinds you down like waves on stone, eats you like termites in timber, buzzes like wasps in your brain and prickles like heat on your skin. Not the loss of everything: rather the loss of just enough to make everything else feel tainted. Just enough to ensure that when the sun shines the brightest is the moment the dark lens flips down and everything becomes storms and shadows and monsters whispering from the corner.

Life becomes an endless conversation with yourself. You tell yourself, as convincingly as you know how, that this is loss: that it’s OK for you to feel this way, because you have lost, and this is how you grieve. But the answer comes back that it’s not just loss, is it? The twisting knife in your ribs, the shaking hands, the gasping breath: it’s more than loss.

It’s knowing that your loss is your own fault.

You know that if you had been a better person, you’d have lost nothing.

And you know, right deep down in those aching bones of yours, that every tear, every sob, every darkened sky, every night of sleepless panic, every throbbing, stabbing pain in your head, every deathly squeeze of your heart…

…is no more than what you deserve.

You brought the pain on yourself. You called down the storm upon your own bloodied brow. You sowed this wind. You are your own victim. May you live a million years and feel the same sour churn in your guts every minute of them, it’ll merely be the punishment that any fair judge would’ve passed upon you.

And so one day after things became so dark you fought yourself into exhaustion to avoid sailing into oblivion, you wake up and that sun is shining again. That future is beckoning again. All the wonders of life - the joy, the love, the beauty, the hope - are once again clear to you and you are relieved you didn’t let yourself be swallowed last night, because today you’ve once again realised that though you’ve lost a lot, there’s still so much out there for you.

And so you face the day, and you walk with shoulders back and chin up and you get on with life just like you know you should.

And as soon as you get used to THAT…your legs are kicked away again, because the conversation still hasn’t stopped, and you are telling yourself that you don’t deserve to feel this way. You do not deserve love. You do not deserve joy. You do not deserve beauty. You do not deserve hope.

What you deserve is yesterday’s darkness. You knew it then and you know it now.

Can you ever be redeemed? Maybe. But as long as you keep letting yourself feel that bracing optimism, you will not be. Every time you allow yourself a moment’s pleasure, you are back to the start. You brought misery upon yourself, and only by remaining miserable can you ever begin to scrub the stain of your own foul nature off yourself. And let’s be honest: you probably never will anyway. Because it IS your nature, and the pathetic thing you are is the pathetic thing you’ll always be.

You’ve lost something? Good. Loss is all you’ll ever deserve.

But not everything. You’ve not lost everything, that’s why you can carry on living, to be assailed again and again by the memory of your loss and the knowledge of your own revolting failure.

And you will have friends, and you will have family, and they will tell you that you don’t deserve the pain, and and that one day you won’t feel the pain, and that what is lost can always be regained.

But what they will never tell you - what they cannot tell you because they do not know - is why you should believe them and not the voice inside you telling you that this is who you are.

Because no family and no friend knows you as well as that voice knows you. It knows exactly who you are and exactly what you deserve and that if you ever escape the psychic butchery that your own choices have inflicted on you nobody should ever shed a tear over it. That voice knows the world would be better without you in it and that you don’t even have the strength of character to do the world that little favour.

If only you had the clarity that comes with losing everything. If only that other voice would stop whispering that there might be a way back and making you stay around to find out if it’s true.

“It’s not the despair, Laura. I can live with the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

For as long as the hope keeps returning, to be crushed and revived and crushed and revived and crushed and revived again, day after day…for as long as loss only rips and tears at me without devouring me…pain will never go away.

But that’s all right. Because this is the pain I deserve. And though I know that tomorrow I’ll lie to myself again that it isn’t, what I know, and who I am, is never going away.