When Nothing Really Matters
A few weeks ago, I was lying across the bed, half-dressed, staring at the ceiling. It was midnight and I was in tears. I had just visited my sick grandma who had only a few days of life left; after enduring a four-hour, silent drive with my boyfriend, where I was aching for words to be said and yet knew, with the regret of a child who’s just dropped her ice-cream, that words won’t do any help at all; after a weekend of being tortured by old wounds and a mind that perhaps wasn’t really against me but was just apathetically, biochemically indifferent.
My suffering felt so particular and designed for me, it was like a birth scar. Something that only I knew the exact shape of because I had been looking at it every day for as long as I can remember. Something that I couldn’t get rid of despite my hatred for it. Something that distinguishes my skin from the normal, pretty skin of others.
I called my mother and, upon hearing my shaky ‘hello,’ she asked what’s wrong. ‘Everything,’ I replied. ‘Oh darling,’ she began. ‘But you shouldn’t feel that way. You have everything, you see. You’re pretty, you’re young, you’re healthy. Some people’s lives are so hard.’
I felt my metaphorical scar change colour and become even more pronounced. Pain mixed with shame turning into loneliness.
The other day, I was stopped at a traffic light when an old man, around sixty-five, crossed the boulevard. He was moving slowly with crutches because he didn’t have legs. His jeans were rolled up to his hips and I could see where his hips ended and were joined by metal sticks. I was wearing sunglasses and I took my time looking at him. I imagined what his life must be like: how he sleeps, how he puts on his shoes, does he avoid looking in the mirror? This image rolled into others and I began to picture the lives of people who have lost their sight, their hearing. I felt my heartbeat quicken a bit. My mind was at once disturbed by these thoughts and couldn’t let go of them – it was repulsed to discover its own limitations, while finding freedom in expansion, in letting go of its usual meditative loops.
I have since been thinking about the idiosyncrasies of pain. It doesn’t make very much sense to me that it is so, indeed the world would sigh a collective sigh of relief if it wasn’t, but pain is not relative.
Pain is not objective, it’s not reasonable, it’s not rational. If it were, Robin Williams would have never committed suicide, the CEO’s daughter wouldn’t cut herself, Angelina Jolie wouldn’t have divorced Brad Pitt.
Pain is absolute. Pain is not something that we can easily let go of with a new perspective or better judgment. It is not something that you can be reasoned or shamed out of. It is something that begs for validation before it can change shape. It is a bubble that is only permeable from the inside.
And while it’s not other people’s job to measure something that is unquantifiable, it is our own responsibility, perhaps, to keep blowing and blowing air into this bubble, filling it with the lives, stories and experiences of others. And that isn’t necessarily because we can then easily burst it.
It is because we’re then able to see the vastness of the human experience. The independence of life’s plan not just in our own lives, but in everybody else’s. We see more clearly the indifference of time itself. The perseverance of a scorching sun in a day full of darkness.
And it is in that moment, when pain mixes with desperation, the salt of tears with that of sweat, our pain with that of others; when we feel as though it’s so unfair, it makes no sense, nothing really matters. It is only then that we have the potential to appreciate everything that does.
To Reality
With Love,
N.
