Pain

I like to think of myself as someone who does a reasonably good job of balancing intellect and emotion. I strive to be rational, but I also honor my emotions. I'm not afraid to cry. I've learned to be angry and to honor my anger while not letting it injure others. I'm not afraid to laugh, to be passionate, to love. While grieving LM, I've allowed my grief to be grief. I deliberately allowed it to run its course in all its manifestations. I didn't try to fight or ignore the pain.

But I've been realizing recently that there are certain kinds of pain that I don't honor, don't allow myself to experience. One of these is relationship pain. When I'm hurt by someone who I love, especially by rejection, then my pride steps forward. I tell myself that I'm not as badly hurt as all that, that I don't give a damn what they do now, and etc. I deny my pain, bury it, because I'm ashamed to allow myself to be hurt by someone who evidently doesn't care about me. If they don't care, why should I?

Then there's the more subtle pain of my daily life. I know how fortunate I am to have the advantages I do, and I believe in being positive as much as possible. I don't have full-time employment, and the employment I've had for most of my adult life has been unsatisfying, but that's no different than millions of other people. I've always had a roof over my head, always had enough to eat, my own car, health coverage. I have no cause to be whining.

And yet. . . my daily life hurts. The temp job I'm doing hurts on a variety of levels. The schedule hurts. The fear for my economic future hurts. The shame of not having an actual career hurts. And every day I try to ignore and bury that pain because I'm doing all that I can to make things work, and I don't want to make it any harder by hurting. Of course, that doesn't actually make the pain go away, it just shoves some of it under an increasingly lumpy rug.

It's only been within the past couple of weeks that I've started to admit to the pain that I habitually deny. And when I acknowledge it and look at it, I start to learn from it. I start to see how badly it's crippling me to leave it festering. I've started to look at the other issues the pain his hidden.

I really don't want to do this work right now. I've hurt so damn much since LM's death, and I don't want to be in pain, or look at pain, or go into the pain, any more. I want to feel good. I want to be happy.

But I don't think that's going to be possible until I go look fully into the faces of my pain, embrace it without wallowing in it, and learn what I need to learn. Only then I will I be able to release these chronic pains and move on.

I don't want to learn these lessons.
I just want the hurting to stop.

But that's not the gig I signed up for when I started working with Ereshkigal.

No More Hot Shards of Broken Glass, sez Rob

My current Freewill Astrology horoscope.

Sagittarius: I hope that by now you have finished scrabbling along on your hands and knees over burning hot shards of broken glass. The next and hopefully final phase of your redemptive quest should be less torturous. In this upcoming chapter, the operative metaphor might be assembling a jigsaw puzzle with 200 pieces, all of which are red. Amazingly enough, you actually have it in you to accomplish this improbable feat -- as long as you don't spread out the puzzle pieces all over the burning hot shards of broken glass. Find a nice, clean, quiet place to do your work.