Hiding from Pain

and still hurting...

I have been trying to hide from my pain again
Smothering it beneath medicated blankets. 
Scrunching my eyes so tightly shut that I see stars behind my eyelids. 
And yet, I am still hurting.

Painkillers don’t really kill pain
Unless it is through a hospital drip
With consciousness slipping away. 
If you want to stay functional the pain can’t leave completely.
For it is tangled around the very essence of reality.
Medication just take the edge off - like a stiff drink.
Numbing, but not removing.
Less like a raw, open wound, and more like a deeply rooted rock of discomfort sat within.

This place I find myself in happened slowly and then all at once.
I had just learned how to meet my pain face to face,
Huddled over the kitchen table
Mugs of tea in aching hands.
Then the pain started to fade ever so slightly,
And life rose up to meet the space it had once inhabited so fiercely. 
It is easy to forget how difficult it is to make room for something so unpleasant,
How difficult it is to love something that feels so wrong. 
To meet it with open arms. 

It was such a relief to not be so consumed by this unwanted guest,
So part of me forgot. 
The experience was cut from my memories.
I now understand more why those that aren’t sick can never fully comprehend the experience of sickness.
I know why people usually don’t remember the excruciating vividness of pain.
It is like it has an expiry date instantly applied after the event is over. 
Filed in a deep, dark corner of the brain, never to be seen to, or referred to again. 
But it makes it so much harder when it returns.
And pain always returns. 

Sometimes it creeps in without you noticing
Curls up in a favourite chair, filling the cushions with small sharp stones - one at a time.
It climbs into bed, wraps its arms around you and squeezes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don’t realise until you suddenly cannot take a full breath.
Other times it flies in like a hurricane touching down,
Ripping carefully organised plans from the diary, 
And burning tightly-held coping mechanisms. 
It can be loud and brutal. 
Hideously unforgiving.

And so it happened,
So slowly that I could allow myself the indulgence of ignoring it.
I could brush things off for so long,
Until I couldn’t. 
Until the pain tore through me because it was fed up of going unnoticed. 
It scraped and scratched at the things I had built in the space it had inhabited before. 
It hunkered down in that jagged hole it had burrowed within me. 
And I did my best to hide from it
Knowing full well that there was nowhere to go where it would not exist.
And that pushing it away just made its growl more fierce, and its claws more sharp.

So here I am, 
Saying the words I have avoided.
Knowing there will still be days of hiding and pushing it away.
Trying to make space at that table again,
To meet my pain face to face,
With mugs of tea in aching hands.

---

Note:

I didn’t want to spend too much time editing this, or even really reading it through. It’s probably another part of hiding, but I also know that I need to give these words a space in order for things to even have the smallest chance to shift again. I have been really struggling with this dip in my health, even more due to the place I’d got to before pain started to creep back in. It is true that the higher you climb, the further you have to fall, and I am so aware of this not being something that people like to hear about. I get it. I would prefer to write about my achievements and successes, but life is so much more than just fair weather and lightness. I don’t know if I will write and post an end of year overshare, as I usually do, but this poem is a chance for me to begin to meet myself where I actually am, and hopefully the rest will follow.

Life isn’t always easy or beautiful, and sometimes it doesn’t feel very kind. We do our best. We take every day as it comes. We continue.