Wednesday 8 May 2002

Pic of the day: Oh, the pine, the pine! I can still do pineful puns, evidently.

The real pain

I don't like pain, but neither am I overly sensitive to it. You might think I were, since I beg sick leave for a mere wrist. But in truth, I am fairly pain tolerant. I tell my dentist to just go ahead and drill unless it is something serious, like a root canal work.

It is not so much the pain as the attrition. To feel that it grows steadily worse, creeping in on me, numbing me earlier and earlier in the day. To see the glacially slow yet unstoppable approach of the point of no return, when it will be too late to heal. To have to restrain myself every day on my free time, to delay that end. That is the real pain.

To compose essays and fiction in my head and then realize that I must let them go, because they are more than a few lines long. That hurts, hurts far more than the wrist. The white paper or the white screen is flypaper for my ideas. Now they just keep buzzing and buzzing and I cannot catch them. Now that hurts. My mind overflows with images, directions, emotions, and I cannot channel them. That hurts.

To see my friends converse and not be able to join them without feeling the twinge of pain and the twinge of guilt for destroying my own body too. That is another kind of hurt. Am I not silent enough as is?

Yeah, I know there are others who are much worse off. But I don't wish for others to get worse, I wish for me to get better. I do not compare myself to others when it comes to creativity, only to the pressure within me.

***

Perhaps I should turn to writing poetry. It is much more condensed. There is (ideally) much more thinking before writing. But poetry, unless you are both gifted and trained that way, sacrifices some meaning for form. I am unwilling to do that. And people interpret poetry. I do not want to be interpreted, I want to be understood! I want to be soul, not just spirit, while I still live.

Actually I suspect I sometimes write too poetic as it is.