The Responsibility of Suffering

I feel like certain destinies are lined up for me: I'll always be at risk for another psychotic episode, which was perhaps comparatively the worst affliction to ever happen to me, short of my two serious suicide attempts, when you're crazy, no one likes you, and you're isolated in your craziness because all of these evil doings are fixated on you and you can't escape, and then predictably, I will suffer from chronic back pain with varying degrees of severity. One day, recently and it was a Thursday, I was running through the house, desperately looking for pain killers, but couldn't find any, and I felt strongly suicidal--like if I'm not out of my pain now, I will kill myself in a gross way. Luckily, I called my mother crying, I didn't tell her about my thoughts of ending my life, but only of the pain, and she listened. I got through the day. However, it proved to me how fragile all of my good sense is. I feel better when I know I have Norco's safely trapped in a bottle--just in case the pain becomes wildly uncontrollable. It's there, I can depend on it. If you want to look at my situation one way, you can say that I'm lucky I had almost nine years of freedom from severe, noncancer, chronic pain. I escape what I saw at the time as my responsibility as a person to suffering. I conned the judges and the jurors, and successfully fleed from my punishment--for a precious amount of time.

I told my mother that I was not as resilient as her. She's dealt with chronic pain since she was 31-years-old. I told her that I'm not as strong because pain feeds the insanity of my mental illness. They dance together down the ol' dirt road, and they share secrets like clandestine lovers. They suck each other's blood, and swoon from weakness. They are desperately addicted to each other.

And some days, they put me away. They consume me, and they dance in the street, naked like a buried corpse underneath the sea.

Today, I fight battles on several fronts. I suffer.