I am in pain. I am not the only one.
I feel like a self-absorbed baby even writing about it. It is not “manly” to admit I hurt. I know better of course. I am well-acquainted with the heavy burden men carry in our culture to be tough. Or at least to appear tough and emotionless.
As a young boy I learned to suppress the urge to cry and to resist defeat. When I was in the sixth grade, someone had the bright idea that a bunch of us fight with one another after school. It was a typically stupid idea for young males in our culture to have and so of course we all agreed to do it.
No one was angry with anyone. There was no need to fight. We were just fighting because it was who we were: young, mindless males. Once the idea was proposed, no one could back down.
I don’t recall how it happened that I was paired up with Bucky Simmons, a year younger but bigger and stronger than me. What I do remember is that all the other fights ended quickly, leaving Bucky and me in the spotlight as a couple dozen kids stood around to watch me get pulverized.
I was not much of a fighter but I did my best. I swung a few punches toward Bucky’s head but don’t recall landing any. What I do remember is getting knocked down and getting up and getting knocked down. After awhile, that is all it was. I stood up and he knocked me down and I stood up again. I knew I couldn’t win but I also knew I couldn’t quit.
After some time, even Bucky was begging me to stay down. But I just couldn’t do it. I thought if I could get up, I should get up. I couldn’t see that I had any other option. I later learned a phrase for this behavior among males: “macho psychotic.”
We care too much what our “brothers” think of us and that concern becomes our master and makes us engage in senseless, dangerous behavior. These are cultural tests of masculinity we learn we must pass. We want to be liked, loved even, but more important we need to be respected. By age 12, I had that figured out.
By the time I was a bloody mess and my clothes dirty and torn, I figured I made my point. I lost the fight badly but I had won something more important in my own primitive mind. I had not given up. I had not given in. I had proven something to myself and in my mind, to others.
I struggled to my feet, retrieved my glasses from my friend and limped the long mile home, relishing with sick anticipation the astonished look on my mother’s face when I came into view and she saw my badges of bruises and blood.
I am in pain. I am not the only one.
And when I think of the physical and emotional pain of others, I feel ashamed to discuss my own. Still, I hope in writing about my pain, we might discover a common truth.
As I write this, it has been 33 days since I had bilateral inguinal hernia surgery. And I am hurting more than I think I should. Most of my pain surges and burns in various areas in what I have learned is “nerve pain.”
Other times it feels like I have tiny pieces of razor blades or sharp rocks embedded in my flesh that stab at me when I move. On occasion, out of nowhere the pain pops up in a new region and talks to me with a cruel and vicious vocabulary, threatening to never leave. Other times it teases me by going away and then coming back harder, leaving a trail of hot anxiety behind it like the wake in the water a boat makes.
For several days last week, I thought I had it licked. I got used to it and rose above it, even forgot about it. Then a client asked me how I felt and I mentioned how I like to forget I have a body, forget myself entirely as I focus my attention on my clients and their concerns. She thought that was odd and doubted the wisdom of my approach to pain and pretty soon her doubts became mine.
I once again found myself preoccupied with my body and its pain. It seemed noticeably worse and I worried it would never go away. I felt depressed and hopeless like I was at the bottom of a well with slippery walls and no way to climb out.
I am in pain. I am not the only one.
I do best with my pain when I step back and just watch how my mind is dealing with it. And it helps to keep busy. The week at home after the surgery was almost too much. I could not wait to get back to work. I love working with my clients and their challenges and concerns to an extent that is probably a little pathological.
I can sit all day with other people’s pain and give them all I have to give and find purpose and meaning in my devotion to their tale of woe and my offer of hope. I find I can put me and my neurotic angst in a small box and let it float away from what really matters here and now.
I am in pain. I am not the only one.
And the pain is not the problem but the fearful part of me that wants it gone. The resistance is the problem. The anxiety and worry that fusses, frets and fumes. Obsessive, negative thinking projecting misery into a future without end.
Instead, it helps to welcome the pain and let it be. It is not my enemy. It is not my friend, either. It just is. I can watch my mind and gently coax it into not making this a worse problem than it needs to be. There are other things that my life is about.
I am in pain. I am not the only one.
And helping others with their pain brings me peace. Some days it is all the peace I get. And all the peace I need. Here’s wishing you much peace in the midst of your emotional or physical pain whatever, whenever, and wherever it is. And don’t forget to bless the necessary lessons we learn along the way. Be grateful for their gifts.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
