Dealing with Perpetual Pain

Imagine waking up, if you get to sleep at all, and remembering your vivid nightmares centered around one theme: pain.  When you awaken the pain is not gone, it is still there, dogging your every step and preventing you from enjoying anything.  Simple things you took for granted, like the sunlight or a child’s laughter become instruments of torture.  Music, conversation, and socializing are ordeals you endure rather than look forward to experiencing.  Pain negates every pleasurable visitation of life and penetrates deep into your core, tainting all of the things of beauty you love so much.  You aren’t the only one suffering from your pain.  Family and friends drift away or hide at the sight of your agony.  You find yourself slinking away to spare them the vicarious pain.  Even your pets learn to manage their lives around your torment.

If it were a terminal illness that could end your life at any moment to spare the rest of the world of your presence, then you could endure it, you think sometimes.  However, is not a terminal illness, it is a perpetual acute migraine which remains for years.

This is my world, yet I remain through it all an optimist.  I haunt the night, unable to go outside during the day.  I hobble around due to neurological problems on my right side.  My tremors and seizures occur daily and I am only able to write for at most an hour each day before fatigue forces me to rest.  I am a physical wreck.

However, like I said, I am an optimist because I believe no matter what happens to my body and my mind, God will preserve and protect me.  Am I naive in this world of so much doubt and depression?  No, I have faith.  When I look at the icon of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) and contemplate her life, I realize how much better I have had it.  King Herod wanted to kill her and her child because of a prophecy.  The Sadducees wanted to kill her because they didn’t believe in divine intervention.  Even as a young woman, she knew the cost of agreeing to what the Angel Gabriel asked of her.  All Hebrew girls did.  Still she accepted.  Despite all of the trouble, it caused her, her family, and her community she said yes.

Thus, despite all of the pain I am enduring, many martyrs endured more.  I am not fit to join their ranks.  I will endure and when I can’t God will help me endure.

Wounded

I am wounded, and yet not bleeding
Wounded by the days which pass in sorrow,
by the moments that drift in pain.
The sun is my enemy,
blinding me to others,
Binding me to solitude,
Enforced by the chaos of fear, conditioning, and bile.

I am wounded, lame, and broken.
Mind bound by mortal loss,
A bloodless Coup d’état of the brain
Chilled by unlove, and hastened to tragedy.
Time is my enemy,
Worth more dead,
Then ever alive,
A corpse drudging down stairs, and up, now rotting.

I am wounded, gifted, and foolish.
Heart shattered on love’s anvil.
Wounded by barriers and spikes of distrust,
By resentment and misfortune.
I am my enemy,
Holding my soul naked,
In shaking hands,
To be crushed by the heartless act of another.

I am wounded, and wounding others
A wolf in a trap turned violent.
Wounding through acts of neglect,
By hiding from pain and fear.
I must surrender,
Give up despair,
And embrace hope,
Or the wounds will never heal — forever.