How It Feels to Hurt

I forgot how it feels to hurt.
I forgot how much it hurts to feel.
I spent eight months not hurting.
And not healing.
I forgot the taste of pure bliss.
I forgot the despair of waking up in darkness.
I was never really depressed.
I was never really happy.
My heart was beating inside my chest, but my blood was just red liquid that carried oxygen to my brain so I could continue existing.
The air that traveled through my lungs was just a way of not dying.
The sun never touched my bones.
The clouds would hover as mist over my skin and keep me shivering.
Sunsets? A beauty that passed through my eyes and documented on Instagtam, without any true appreciation for the depth of colors I always seek.
Or used to.
I talk about feeling all the time.
It's therapeutic, I guess, to talk about something you once had.
Okay, my emotions weren't totally gone.
It's not like medication can remove the serotonin and dopamine batteries from my brain.
It can lock them up and hold the emotions at bay.
So while I'd be grateful I wasn't totally freaking out, I was still totally freaking out because I couldn't feel enough to actual freak out and actually feel something.
The result of not feeling is, unfortunately, not caring.
I'd get these tingling nudges in the back of my mind that I ought to care about whatever I was not caring about, so I would try to care about that thing while not being able to, and then get not actually frustrated that I couldn't actually feel deeply about something which would make me more not actually frustrated because I couldn't feel!

Then I stopped my medication.
And suddenly I could feel.
And hurt, and I felt all the other things too, but I especially felt the frustration and guilt and depression and anger and DEEP, aching root of pain that had been held inside for so long all bursting out at once.
And it makes me want to not feel.
But I know, I can't not care anymore, cause that didn't get me anything besides bad grades and an eating disorder.

So I will keep feeling.
I'll relearn how it feels to hurt, and how much it hurts to feel.
And I will remember that with hurting comes healing.
And I want that more than anything.

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