I know you are probably sick of hearing about it. But I will tell you the last week has been one of the most revolutionary in the pain department in my life. It all started last week about this time when I got a DM. And then it just kind of fell apart from there.
The last week has felt like I have been free falling down a long canyon that just keeps getting narrower and narrower. And while my bouncing off the canyon walls should slow my descent to the bottom, it just doesn’t. So I careen here and there and bounce all over the place with ever increasing speed, and pain.
I feel bloodied and bruised and broken. There have been times in the last week I have felt absolutely abjectly lost, hurt and almost inconsolable. What does one do with all the love one feels when the person upon which the love was attached becomes dislodged from your life? My experience is that the love transmogrifies itself into pain. The more love you felt? The more pain experienced.
When you wake up, as if from a dream (or in my case a delusion) pain surrounds. Last week, it was all I saw. Everywhere I looked, there it was showing up like some sort of vapor that now pervaded my life. I couldn’t move on. I couldn’t completely process what was happening. I just could only seem to breathe, eat, sleep and live with the pain of last week’s revelations. And attempt to assimilate them into something understandable.
I feel like I have just taken a crash course (literally) in Pain: The Unexpected Fucking Blindside. But as the week has now come to a close, I can feel the pain loosening its grip on me and my life. I was able to laugh at a situation yesterday that would have caused me to burst into tears last week. That feels good. That feels better.
Today, I now feel like I am moving forward with the pain easing off. Like the acute phase of an illness finally lifting. Like being down for the count for months, but now, having the strength and energy to be able to shower and a short walk. There are still moments when my life is overwhelming. Where the pain comes back in a tidal wave of grief and loss and hurt and sorrow. But I feel like I have learned this last week to swim those waves. Holding myself up and allowing myself to be carried instead of desperately fighting the currents.
As much as I would like to believe that the pain is in fact receding, I know that pain is just busy doing something else, with someone else. My turn in the pain barrel will return. It has to because I am still here, living life. And pain shall always be a part of that. But today, and even most of yesterday, I didn’t feel meekly lost in a sea of grief. And I didn’t feel like I was tumbling down a pit of despair, loss and grief either.
Yesterday almost felt like floating. Like somehow on my two year journey to the bottom, I was given a reprieve and granted the supernatural ability to float. It was not flying, because if it were, I would fly right out of this particular canyon and never, ever come back. But instead, of flying, it felt a lot like floating. A nice gift of not toppling down the canyon walls, glancing off one side and then the other. Somehow yesterday, I just kind of hovered, pausing my descent and pain for most of the day.
And the gift at the end of the day was to be able to laugh at something that just the day before would have made me cry. Something that would have hurt, didn’t. And it felt like the hard flooring on the pain pedal eased off just a little.
I know there is more to come. I know I am mixing metaphors like a mother fucker. Pain is like that. Jumbling everything together and causing you to lose your vision of the horizon.
Sigh.
Anyway, yesterday I did feel the pain ease up ever so slightly. I felt a little less lost, a little more ok and a little less heartbroken. I wasn’t filled with anger and thoughts of revenge, although those times come, but I care enough about myself to allow them just to pass right on through. There is nothing down in that particular bitter well but more pain and suffering. And for me, there has been quite enough of that already.
There have been times in my life where I feel like every day was just a lesson in pain. That I woke up and endured it all day long. And when I got sober, I thought those days had ended. Well, at least the gross accumulation of them anyway. This whole shitshow has caused me to have to re-evaluate that previous conclusion. Sometimes, even while sober, there are moments that stretch into days and weeks where pain rules supreme.
But then like an errant warm day in the heart of winter’s landscape, you find yourself happy, carefree and living without the mantle of grief, loss and heartbreak if only for a day. And it is then you know, that you are gonna be ok. This will pass. You will learn things (perhaps things you wished to never learn) but you learn them anyway. And you come to find that you have the power to float back to that canyon ridge and plant your feet firmly back on Tierra firma. And while you are tempted, perhaps you always will be, to peer back into that canyon that seemed like it was the vital container for your life, you see that all that resides in that particular canyon is a black abyss that will always promise the world...and deliver less and less until all you have left is nothing, but pain, sorrow and loneliness.
And as you stand at canyon edge, you, for the first time in a very long time, look up and around instead of down. And you see that you are not stuck, you were only waylaid. You are now free to move about your life, explore other canyons and oceans and go wherever the fuck you like because what happens when you survive the pain? You free yourself from the ties that bind, pain can set you free...but in my case, anyway, I have to be willing to stop believing that that particular pain can ever be resolved.
Sometimes the easing of pain can only come when you realize a particular person, or relationship or love is only capable of bringing extreme highs and extreme lows. And while you might rise to a place high above the canyon, your willing proximity will always toss you back into the tumbling fissure over and over again until you finally learn that that is all there will ever be in that particular crevasse.
I feel like yesterday, I stopped peering in. I haven’t walked away just yet, but I am now resting comfortable at a safe distance from said chasm. And with that small distance comes a measured feeling of the easing of pain...
THANK FUCKING GOD!
Again...still.
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