Pain
I don’t know what I’m here to write, I just know that I have this feeling like I should keep it up. So here I am, writing more.
What’s the point of writing for one’s self? Reflection? I don’t get my actual feelings out if I’m not conversing with someone. Julie talks about reading her journals from when she went to therapy early in her relationship with Jon and how much clarity she finds in it, how nice it is to see the clear lines of work and effort and thought that went into various decisions in her life. I don’t do that. Maybe I should? I honestly don’t find it compelling to write for myself. The kinds of thoughts that I write don’t accurately represent me internally in a given moment. Maybe like a sign post signifying the general area it might be helpful to write the various interpretations I’ve created from parts of my life, and then look back on them later, saying, "Ah from this vantage point, I can see the shape of the land, the whole from all of the pieces I could barely consider when in the tasks and minutia."
Compare this to when I was in high school and early college, writing on Livejournal. I experienced so many strong emotions I had trouble processing, and writing for that kind of audience helped a bit. So many of those old posts feel like I couldn’t handle the changes in my life, external and internal. Not so much like that anymore.
I’m glad I’m more stable now. I can’t imagine experiencing life like I did back then, adrift and afloat in this chaos I couldn’t really control or properly handle. The things I can’t control now are so much smaller and more limited: the outside world, sections of my directed efforts, scheduling. My emotions I don’t outright control, but they are expressed in such a less charged fashion now. It’s not even that things are duller or less dramatic, but that they’re more normal and I’m more used to them.
When I was a kid, if I fell down or got hurt, I didn’t have a basis for knowing if a given pain was strongly reacting to, so I strongly reacted to all of them. Compared to 0, all pain is hell. Over time, the experience of pain created an understanding of the severity of a given pain, and also the kinds of reactions I would need to express in response.
As a very young kid, I fell off my bike and fucking died. Later in Ohio, I fell off my bike and walked the bike home crying quietly.
I remember not handling soap in my eyes when I started bathing by myself; this crushing feeling of being unable to escape the pain. Nowadays, if I get soap of the same kind in my eyes, the burn is so much less. I feel it, but I also feel the kind of casual, "this is slightly annoying and unimportant" that comes from experience of what other pains feel like Once, in middle school, I went on a church trip down to some church in Mexico (Baja California, tbh), and by the end of the drive that couldn’t have been more than 3 hours I had to pee so bad I was letting very very small amounts out into my pants just to relieve myself of some of the pressure. I was almost in tears, honestly. I’m writing this while needing to pee, and I’ve needed to for nearly 2 hours. For some dumb reason, I nowadays hold it until the last possible second, but regardless of how long I hold it I don’t experience almost any mental pain related to whether I pee or don’t.
Weird, idk.