a house of cards

visual tales of my adventures - early morning near the Crescent beach / seaweed art / red geranium love / Winnie Dixon near the boat ramp at Dingy beach / gulls & gulls & gulls / a tiny beachside succulent forest / Monty's Emporium of Goodness window detail / periwinkles etc / our little harbour surrounded by wildflowers / black pine, lichen & 29 Black Street

He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain. James Jones - From Here to Eternity


to me Pain is Fear, Pain is Sadness, Pain is Shame - I have all 3 in spades.

There's a part of me, of my psyche, a part of who I am that I've been trying, desperately at times, to kick to the curb- it's my predilection to continually be waiting for the sad axe to fall. The sad thing, the one biggy I've been predicting my whole life, the one I've been waiting and watching for as long as I can remember. Since childhood. Text books & pop psychology refer to this kind of anxiety & worry as hypervigilance, a sick twisted version of the sensible girl guide motto be prepared. 

Be prepared for anything, have a Plan B (C-K), be prepared to be knocked to the ground, get ready to be devastated, to be so sad as a result of this next and perhaps final sad axe falling that this time you will surely die of the sadness - it will hurt that bad. It's hard work this vigilance, and at the worst of times it makes me feel sick and anxious. The feelings, and reasons for feelings, become tangled and muddled they all meld together into a kind of constant, quiet hum of dread. I've described the feeling to be much like your going to go onstage - in 4 hours. Not that intense just about to go on stage but something much more subtle, a feeling that catches you in your stomach or at the back of your throat and whispers be careful ... something ... I can't be sure exactly what something, but some thing is just not right. 

Much of the time I'm not really even sure what I'm anxious about ... but I might as well keep up the guard because that something bad/sad could happen ... at any moment. I've convinced myself that it's best to be well prepared.

I wrote the above passage in September 2010 - I found it while lost a few nights ago in my own blog archives. Lately this demon hypervigilence has taken over my life, lately that trifecta of pain badness - Fear, Sadness & Shame has taken over ... it's a house of cards around here.

Truly feel pain, rather than know and understand pain. Don't confuse knowledge with emotions otherwise you will know recovery but never feel it. Rationalizing, minimizing and intellectually justifying our pain can be easier than feeling it and working through it. Robert Ackerman - Perfect Daughters: Adult Daughters of Alcoholics

This last quote makes so much sense to me but at the same time it's a complete puzzle - how does one know if you are truly feeling the pain or only knowing the pain - especially if that pain has been hangin' around as long as you can remember ?