Theme
10:22am January 28, 2014

The last 24 hours.

badwolfshell:

I’ve been trying to describe the last 24-8 hours but my language has been left wanting.

I’m drawn to a quote for a favorite author of mine John Green. Taken for The Fault In Our Stars. When the heroine of the book wakes to find her body in pain, (which is what happened to me)

“I’ve told myself before - that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always i didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

The only solution was to try and unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in the vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word.”

Wow I’d forgotten that quote.

When I’m in horrible amounts of pain, I often have to shut off my mind and just not think, because thinking only makes it worse.  It doesn’t make the pain go away, but it makes the tiniest tiniest difference in the level of suffering involved.

Also I reach out to my friend when that happens, and do something that’s kind of like mentally holding her hand, since we’re thousands of miles apart.  That works best when my mind is shut off too.  And weirdly enough, sometimes she feels it and emails me.  I do that by sort of… shutting off my mind, but going unfocused in a very focused way, and letting myself be drawn towards her.

(And shutting off my mind doesn’t mean pushing at it, it means the opposite.  It means letting it go, dropping away into the darkness.)

And… I just can’t say it so poetically.

Despite having a completely different illness and prognosis, I really related to that book, and it was the little things like this that made it so relatable.  You could tell the author had spent a lot of time talking to people with chronic or terminal illnesses.