This Thing About Pain

Lately, my feeling had been in a terrible mood. There’s a thousand different pain longing to be acknowledged inside of me; yet I don’t know which one to feel first since they are all screaming crowdedly in my gut –  ready to explode if I choose to air any of them before the other.

There’s also this thousand different kind of pain to be said, crying in my stomach – there are a lot of unsaid cravings in those unrelieved pains. Yet again I don’t know where to start.

...

Before I go too far into anything about pain, firstly I will have to admit that the past couple weeks had been hard for me and a lot of others in my class. We have just lost someone and the reason to his loss has no logical explanation behind it. In a sentence we would put it this way: it just happened.

The pain was brutal. When all we want is reason, we didn’t get it. When all we want is for him to come back, we didn’t get it either. We are not even allowed to fight for this loss when we wanted it so bad. Indeed, we do not know what would we say or what would we cause – more trouble or more pain – if we did try; but at least we should not go down without a fight, right?

Right. But no, we weren’t allowed to reason.

...

Sigh.

I don’t know. A part of me is still at grief, I suppose.

I am at grief for a loss I would never imagine happened to me at the age of 18. I would have never imagined tasting another injustice and evil in this broken world. I would have never imagined what grief can do to me until I actually taste it, two weeks ago.

I am indeed at grief for someone who have ingrain a new good set of values inside of me, taken away just like that – a grief for a lifetime teacher who would forever left his footprint inside my heart.

I grief because of shock. It happened too quickly that I felt so bad for not seeing it coming.

I grief because I do not know how to chase the grief away.

I grief, because there was no proper goodbyes and no preparation for that feeling to come – there was no cushion to prevent the break of my falling heart. The damage it caused is surreal.

But the worst grief, though, is not being able to do anything to prevent him from going. There is nobody to express all this anger to but the Creator.

...

All I know about grief is that while I am not able to chase it away is to distract the mind as often as I can so I don’t have to crumble down the same way the earlier hours does.

I am indeed not accustomed to it – nor do I feel like I can overcome it in another week or two. I am just not ready.

I feel emptier than before; I feel like one of the ways to chase the feeling away is by buying something or learning something so the passing hours would go faster. But then I asked myself again: since when do I become so broken that I go running into worldly things to relinquish the pain I’m feeling?

Now that I am able to choose my own bad choices do I encounter grief. Is it really by my own choice, though, to have grief as an outcome? No, it doesn’t. But whether to stay within it do I have my own words to take responsibility for that stay. –red

“That’s the thing about pain: it demands to be felt”

(TFIOS, p. 63)