6/30/15

Pain

I want to write a post on pain.  Why?  Because I've experienced it.  Details are too many and too personal to write down in one blog post.  I haven't had an awful life.  I had a wonderful childhood [despite being brought up with serious body-image issues] and I'm happy.  I'm in college, in love with my major, surrounded by supporting friends.

That being said, however, I have gone through pain.  At this point in my life, the taste of pain is very familiar on my tongue.  And I say that because it's true, not because I'm screaming for attention.  Recently, an event in my life took my heart, chewed it up, and spit it back into the school semester.  It was hard to deal with.  It was painful to deal with.  And I'm still trying to come to terms with it.

But I've learned a lot through it:

Pain isn’t poetic.  It isn’t everything that writers and romantics have chalked it up to be.  Pain hurts.  When your body is numb and your head is pounding and your soul wants to breathe…those are the moments when you feel like you’re choking.  Poetic?  No.  Fierce.  Brave, perhaps.  Savage.  Crushing.  Brutal.  But poetic?  Never.

Sometimes, you have to take the jump knowing that there is painful landing at the bottom.  The air rushes out of your lungs with the brunt of it, and it will take time to recover.  But you will heal.  When you stagger to your feet, your heart beats painfully, but you will be stronger.  You jumped.  And you will live.  Standing up for yourself hurts.  It hurts like a bitch.  But it’s better to be alive the way you want to be, than the way another expects you to be.

You live.  You breathe.  You hurt.  You love.  And sometimes, just sometimes, you forget to be careful and you dream.  It is in those moments we are the most free, the most vulnerable, the most afraid.  But always the most beautiful.

Is pain poetic?  No.  Pain is a bitch.  But through it all––through all the agony and tears and frustration and guilt––you can gather up the pieces and emerge as the person you are.  Scarred, yes.  Terrified, yes.  But brave.

That is the poetry.

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