what is pain

it doesn’t matter what made you sad, how it happened or how long it will last. whatever makes you experience the pain of sadness doesn’t escape your memory easily. it could be a death of a loved one, loss of finances, a break up, a rough patch in your life where nothing falls into place, nothing is going well for you. your career might be falling apart, or you hate it so much you come home dead every day, or your children refuse to talk to you.

for me, a couple things have gotten me very down and i’m sure i’m not the only one. after realizing the job i had landed before was nothing i had expected to be, including being a victim of unecessary pickiness and a non-encouraging environment, i had to leave it for the sake of my sanity. coming home everyday frustrated and angry and depressed wasn’t my idea of a good start to my career.

on top of that, i had recently found out my ex has a new girl now. which i’m sure she’s an amazing person. but that part of me just knows, she’s the reason why he left me. no matter how many times i tried to wrap my head around the reason he told me, “you aren’t a motivational drive for me”, it just couldn’t make sense to me. and so, when i had accidentally found out about this new girl, it all made sense. everything hit home. they met at his gym, where he basically lived, and she was a lifter. yes, that was all she had to be to have something going. and so i bawled, again, after 9 months of being as strong as i could to carry past the initial hurt, like a baby. everything hurt as much as the first time he left me to “explore with other guys” and the second time when he pulled me away from another man back into his arms just to leave me again. it’s so easy to handle it on the surface. it’s so easy to just shrug it off and say ‘it was for the best’ or ‘he wasn’t worth it, now i know’ but you can’t just dismiss memories, and experiences, like it was nothing that was worth remembering. every fucking memory in your life is worth remembering. that month of work, where my manager picked on the most ridiculous details to seeing another girl post on my ex’s post was very painful.

what is pain? is it that physical clenching of the heart or a physical wound which causes you to bleed or is it tears that just can’t stop when they had to, or rolling yourself into a ball in the washroom hoping nobody sees you? loving them to the ends of the earth only to have the dream of being together shattered by technical reasons is painful. having to leave someone you love because they’re not ready to face the world is painful. there are so many definitions of pain. but my personal definition of pain is how my heart feels since the beginning of the year. it’s in constant pain. it feels like theres  a dead weight on it, unable to be lifted no matter how much i distract myself, how much i drive myself forward, how much i see friends, help them, or spend time with family. it’s like it’s caving in on itself, and honestly, i’m a little scared.

i can barely feel a pulse when i put my hand over it, and as i lie down in bed to get through another day, i can hear its faint beating in my ears.

that’s my pain.