What happens when the suffering ends—and you have to decide how to live again?
When you get to a certain time in your life, you’ve probably seen some shit. I know that there’s someone out there who has been perfectly loved and supported their entire life. I hear stories. I assume they’re true.
Fucking good for them. The rest of us have scars. Some days I feel like all I am is a bunch of scars stitched together.
Yoga helps. When I started over a year ago, I was so locked in my body that it feels like a miracle every time I feel space between my ribs. I can do things with my body now that I never thought I’d be able to do. Last October, I went to a retreat in Morocco and couldn’t stand on one foot for three seconds. I didn’t trust the earth to hold me up. Now I can hold crow for five seconds—and when I rise from it, I yawp like Whitman intended. The scars are there, but they’re not binding me any more. They move, they stretch. Some of them are even changing.
I am living with things that I never thought I would live with. I thought that the things that happened to me would kill me eventually and all I was doing was enduring until they finally took me down. I thought I was on borrowed time until my past consumed me. I thought that I had worked so hard to get off a ventilator and get sober and to survive things that other women do not survive in order to just exist.
I thought that if I endured enough, something good would happen. I was taught this. In CCD, I learned that good people who suffer in the correct way get to heaven. The crucifix above my childhood bed told me suffering was holy. Jesus hung on that cross for us, and every lesson at church was a meditation on pain. Later, Buddhism taught me that life is suffering. Every script says the same thing. Every script says endure.
But the more I learned about the world, I learned that there are probably things that are worse than death. The loneliness that lasts years. The violence disguised as love. The pain of a mind turned on itself.
In the past few years I’ve learned there is nothing good enough in this world or beyond to justify the suffering that I’ve been through. Not that my suffering is unique–I’m a middle aged, middle class white woman in the United States of America. However, there have been layers on top of it that have made it unbelievably hard, and there are some days, more than I’d like to admit, that the act of letting my feet hit the ground when I get out of bed in the morning isn’t so much the start of an amazing opportunity but rather a question: Can I really do this today? Can I put one foot in front of the other without collapsing?
Adrenaline kept me going for a couple of years, but after I got back from Morocco last March I couldn’t pretend to be functional any more, at least in the way I used to be. That’s a story in itself. It’s a chapter in a book that I’m writing, and I’ll leave it there for now.
But today I realized that yes, life is suffering, but not the way that we’re taught. We all are born with wounds that we spend our whole lives trying to heal, and so many of us get other ones layered on top of the original.
Although we can put a number to our pain in the emergency room, we cannot rank ourselves amongst others based on who has endured the most. (Although many people would like to try.) Trauma isn’t a sliding scale: In the middle of what we can’t control—and the shame and guilt after—we all feel the same: naked, alone, and desperate to hide.
But today, after stretching and moving my scars around so that they are .001% more flexible, I realized that I’m no longer in pain. And now that I’m not enduring, I have no idea what to do with my life. There’s no manual here. There’s no manual for being scarred so deeply that you no longer resemble anything close to who you used to be but are still expected to follow the same rules.
I don’t want to live like that any more.
I think that most people don’t know that where I’m at even exists. This is the realm of young, white, male philosophy majors with trust funds, and I panicked that I cannot afford to be in this rare air. Regardless, I AM here, and I AM breathing it.
What the fuck do I do?
I do know this: in just a few days I will be on my fifth continent in just over six months. I might want to move there, I might not, but I’m exploring. The last time I did this I ended up moving across an ocean three weeks later, and I have a feeling that this might be a similar situation.
But this is the first time that I’m truly free. I’m not escaping, I’m not fleeing, I’m not trying to get as far away from something as possible. I’m coming from a place of curiosity about what comes next, without the anxiety of what might happen actively nipping at my heels (and being consciously ignored). I don’t know what’s going to work, but I know what didn’t in the past, so I’m going to stay away from that.
No one ever talks about what comes after the suffering in real life. Nobody tells you what comes after the resurrection. I’m about to find out.
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