I
hoping that my persistent and unbearable back pain is cancer – at least that
way I have an excuse for being so tired all the time. Then my children won’t have to watch me
wither and die from chronic, crushed idealism.
Cancer seems like a nicer way for them to see me die. Better to burn out than fade away and
whatnot. When you find out that the
situation you yourself put yourself in is what holds you under … well, there’s
no one else to blame. (That, and a Memory
Foam bed that keep sucking me down, down, down into the foam with no concern to
the crushing pain on the spine.)
What we
tell ourselves often becomes a version of the truth, and that truth is often a
very distorted version of reality. One
day, you sort of come out of the anesthesia.
And like any painful, extractive surgery, it’s a slow recovery. A slow coming-back-to-consciousness
process. And (unlike surgery) you don’t
really want to see what’s unfolding before your eyes in this new reality. It’s hard to swallow, so you resist it –
maybe like an unwanted laced joint or something. You wanted to get high, but you didn’t
bargain for the chemicals intertwined with the THC.
So what
do you do? Weep? Shuffle about in a depressive stupor? Hit eject?
Once a person becomes entrenched in a life, it’s very hard to extricate. Honestly, it’s like a death in the
family. Or maybe like my own death. I don’t know.
But it can’t be more painful than watching your life become something
barely distinguishable to the thing you’d imagined it. It’s hard to look in the mirror and see one
person and then look at the people around you and see someone completely
different. Which one is me? Who am I if no one knows me because they have
their own version of me that I don’t subscribe to?
Here is
something which sounds familiar to me in a way.
It was written by Virginia Woolf right before she killed herself. She drowned herself – a terrible, slow death,
I’m sure.
In
her last note to her husband she wrote:
|
“
|
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad
again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I
shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So
I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest
possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I
don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease
came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that
without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write
this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of
my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I
want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would
have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your
goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two
people could have been happier than we have been. - - V
|
The
difference is that I feel exactly the opposite, in terms of love. I feel that I had someone who was
like-minded, I wouldn’t feel crazy. I
wouldn’t want to walk into the river and die; I’d just talk it out. And maybe the death I look forward to is not
a physical one, but more the practical action of cutting out all the negativity
in my life and stepping into something healthier and more in sync with what
makes me happy. I’d call the
uncomfortable bed a metaphor, but that fucking mattress is really hurting me –
it just happens to be the back pain that wakes me up every night and day and
reminds me of the other painful parts of life. So I bought a new one. Let’s see if I can set the rest straight too.
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