Drowning Never Looks Like Drowning

I can hear my neighbors outside talking, hear their voices through the screen of the open window. The sky is overcast and cloudy; wind rustles the blinds and wafts the tea towel hanging from my oven handle. I wonder if they can hear my animal keening, cheek pressed to the blue slate tile, salt limning my cheeks. Even the animals are afraid of me when I cry like this, watching warily from across the room, unsure and uncertain.

Usually, I am able to keep the real me, the me that is in constant pain, tightly controlled and carefully hidden. Sometimes she shows up unannounced: she is too loud, too abrasive, too negative, too angry, too mean. No one actually wants to see what happens to the human soul after more than a decade of chronic pain. It is Too Much. I have learned to dissociate in order to function, an uncoupling of conscious recognition. Pain happens from a distance and I steadfastly maintain separation. I am the unwilling captain of a mutinying meatcage; there is an ocean between my mind and the excruciating torture I experience.

What does it mean to have to make yourself an island in order to survive?

Sometimes the pain crests and breaks, a tsunami wave of misery so deep and wide that it splinters my carefully wrought seawall of separation. I wonder what my brain looks like, wonder if years of pain has worn down the nooks and crannies and turned the gelatinous pink smooth. I cannot maintain; without this wall, I am become rough and irascible, a wasp nest human of fricatives, an unmitigated disaster. The people you love won’t understand why when you lash out like a barracuda caught in a net, all terror and silver-sharp gnashing teeth. I cannot tune out the anguish like so much static and white noise; my knees buckle under the crucible of my hurt.

If I talked about my pain while it happened, I would never stop. Every word would be agony writ large, a thesaurus of suffering. Pain defines every movement, every thought, every breath, every experience. When I can feel it all — when it has overwhelmed my defenses and I am buffeted helplessly against the barnacles — that is when I want to self-destruct. That is the moment when I want to feel anything else: the fiery burn of alcohol, shots slammed in rapid succession while leaning over my sink. The hot burn of the lighter singing my eyelashes as I light a cigarette. The rat-a-tat machine gun fire of my tachycardic heart after I breathe in a cloud of cannabis.

You can tell the people you love best that you experience pain every waking second of every single day, but they won’t ever truly understand. Pain is too fleeting of an experience for most, the brain not malleable enough for the recall and recollection required for comprehension. They will understand to the best of their ability that you hurt; on good days, they will cater to you, ask what you need, tuck you in. But they will never truly understand. They cannot; moreover, (perhaps subconsciously), they do not want to because they don’t want to drown with you. Unrelenting pain is a riptide that drags you under and tears the air from your lungs, leaving your limp rag doll carcass to tumble in the shallows. The people you love dutifully believe you when you swear you’re treading water even as the waves crest over to fill your mouth with sea salt.

Drowning never looks like drowning.

I cannot share my pain with people. I cannot roll it into a ball and pass it on for someone else to hold for just a moment while I catch my breath. But I have learned that sometimes, if I sit still enough for long enough, sometimes I can quell the black hole burning where my heart should be, the soul-sucking nuclear bomb ticking like a timebomb in my chest. If I focus all of my attention, all of my energy on simply not moving, maybe — just maybe — I won’t want to self-destruct anymore. So I lay on the floor and sob, waiting for the freedom of dissociation, wondering when the pain will ebb and I can lift my head above water again.

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