{"id":643,"date":"2010-04-19T08:12:07","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T13:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=643"},"modified":"2018-10-30T17:28:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T21:28:03","slug":"pain-diary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"Pain Diary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the third anniversary of the surgery that delivered me from 12 years of chronic pain<\/a>.\u00a0 My shrink, who I went to under protest, told me to treat it as a holiday.\u00a0 A birthday.\u00a0 She said, for the rest of my life, I should take off April 19th and celebrate.\u00a0 So, as you read this, I\u2019m in West Virginia tripping over my roots and relaxing at the Jabberwock <\/a>which, I\u2019m pleased to say, is the best bar in America.<\/p>\n

Well, actually, I\u2019m driving home as you read this.\u00a0 Weaving over the mountains and screaming hysterically at my fellow Washingtonians as I merge onto 270.\u00a0 But\u2026 That\u2019s what holidays are about.<\/p>\n

The shrink.\u00a0 I hated going to one, but it seemed like the thing to do.\u00a0 Miracle cures and long weekend holidays have handed my life back to me on a silver platter and, yet, I\u2019m having trouble coping without the pain.<\/p>\n


\nLooking back on the path of my life, things were easiest when I was in pain, hazed by drugs, an empty shadow of a person.\u00a0 I had two options:\u00a0 To give up and die, or to fight my way forward and carve out whatever meager existence I could manage.\u00a0 I have been often praised for choosing the latter but, the truth is, that choice was simply a desperate attempt to stay alive.\u00a0 Clinging to some last vestige of humanity by one fingernail.<\/p>\n

But the world was black and white.\u00a0 If I decided to cling to that cliff, then I had to do things to create my life\u2019s path.\u00a0 I had to prove to myself that I could function despite the pain and the medication prescribed to dull it.\u00a0 I travelled extensively, I started my own company, I took every fragment of my childhood dreams and wove them into something\u2026anything\u2026that said I am alive.\u00a0 I pursued the faint hope of life and salvation with an Ahab-like quality.<\/p>\n

I was never able to truly connect with anyone while in pain.\u00a0 No proper lovers, and the few real friends I made had to tolerate this distant, inhuman shadow person. I didn\u2019t have any real connections, any grounding.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t develop new dreams or hopes. I stopped living when the pain started shortly after my 21st birthday.<\/p>\n

And then I woke up 12 years later. From my excesses, I was in debt and trapped at a job designed to cater to the pain.\u00a0 A job that involved no brainpower and provided extraordinary paid leave and understanding of my condition. A job meant to only be around for eight or nine months a year, with the rest of the time spent bedridden, or in the hospital.<\/p>\n

With the debt of my business ventures and travels piling up, I found myself stuck in place. Afraid to move.\u00a0 Now the distraction was not pain, it was everything around me.\u00a0 I was suddenly aware.\u00a0 I spent four months after the surgery getting off the meds and, by the following September, I was clean, still out of pain, footloose and fancy free.<\/p>\n

And I stopped.\u00a0 I choked.\u00a0 Facing life for the first real time in my adulthood gave me the yips. Nothing was black and white anymore.\u00a0 The pursuits that I employed to try and save my life while in pain now seemed excessive and unwise. The money was gone, the drive was gone, the need for that drive had been wiped out over the course of six hours of brain surgery.<\/p>\n

The resentment at losing 12 years consumed me.\u00a0 And, added to that, at 33, I had my first adult opportunity to think about the shit that happened during my childhood, and the eventual disastrous ends that both my parents came to. These things that normal people usually cope and deal with as they age just simply clicked on one day in my early 30\u2019s.\u00a0 Everything at once pouring into this no longer shadow soul.<\/p>\n

It took me a year to flush the pills that had been prescribed for the pain.\u00a0 It took me nearly three years to flush the final secret stash of painkillers.\u00a0 The healing process \u2013 and learning to enjoy life \u2013 was not something that seemed to take a natural course.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been trying to jumpstart it ever since I woke up, today, three years ago.<\/p>\n

And, still, I cringe when someone strokes my cheek, an old pain trigger.\u00a0 I turn away from the Metro as it rushes into a station, the wind another pain trigger.\u00a0 Still I put my face under the spray from the showerhead and I marvel at not being in pain.\u00a0 The last three years have all felt like a single day. I haven\u2019t yet gotten over how fucking amazing it is to be out of pain.<\/p>\n

Which is great, right? But life moves on.\u00a0 Love is found.\u00a0 Healing begins.\u00a0 But the dead calm of the healing process frustrates me. I want to snap out of it.\u00a0 I want to wake up completely and embrace life with the same abandon that I enjoyed while in pain.\u00a0 I want to say, fuck, yes, let\u2019s go to Europe for the entire month of June. I want to throw myself into publishing books again.\u00a0 I want to find new hobbies and drive west into the setting sun until I get tired.\u00a0 I want to do all the things I once forced myself to do in a pain and drug haze.\u00a0 This time, I can do them as a normal human being.\u00a0 I can take away stories of adventure and renewal instead of tales of lost pills and days spent in a strange bed at a B&B unable to even drink water without white hot agony.<\/p>\n

It occurs to me that I just don\u2019t know how to navigate real life.\u00a0 I don\u2019t understand how to do things unless the decision is life or death. The nuances of relationships are alien to me. Every relationship I\u2019ve had has been of the same quality as every other endeavor I forced myself to undertake. That mad, desperate attempt to prove that I was alive.\u00a0 A formula that destroyed the other person involved.<\/p>\n

Now I need to be taught, using the gentlest baby steps, how to work in a relationship.\u00a0 How to overcome the fear of pain and touch and intimacy.\u00a0 Which would be fine, I suppose, if I was some idiot kid.\u00a0 But I\u2019m fucking 36.\u00a0 I need to get moving now, today.<\/p>\n

So three years later, and I\u2019m yet to fully snap out of it.\u00a0 I did wake up after the surgery, I am no longer a shadow person.\u00a0 I am a million miles from where I was yesterday, three years ago. But I guess whatever it is that we have deep inside each of us takes some time to heal.\u00a0 Takes time to truly wake up.\u00a0 The experts say that it can\u2019t be forced. I have trouble with that concept because I spent 12 years forcing life. But I suppose I need to stop and think about the difference \u2013 I forced a superficial, imaginary life for those 12 years. I wasn\u2019t actually living. I haven\u2019t yet learned how to.<\/p>\n

So\u2026fuck it, I\u2019m going to Europe for a month. But this time I\u2019ll save up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the third anniversary of the surgery that delivered me from 12 years of chronic pain.\u00a0 My shrink, who I went to under protest, told me to treat it as a holiday.\u00a0 A birthday.\u00a0 She said, for the rest …<\/p>\n

Pain Diary<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[89,90,88],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-pain","tag-ptsd","tag-tn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}