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When you are truly broken, you grab something. This is the verge of a panic attack or the melting of your heart or the pain in your stomach or leg strangling you. You grip whatever you can find. A closet. A table. A lamp. And most often, you’re so desperate that the grip is bad; a finger or two at a painful angle. But you can’t let go. You just can’t. If you’re experiencing it you couldn’t describe it, but it would be the same if you had never experienced and seen it.
It’s like falling from a cliff.
Like you have just dropped off the most enormous cliff and you reached out. You grabbed the edge and it doesn’t matter that it hurts because you can’t let go. You endure that small pain to survive a much larger and insurmountable loss.
Lots of movies portray people getting a bad grip and letting go as a consequence.
I’m here to tell you the terrible news, that you will not let go and you will not save yourself.
You. Will. Fall.
You WILL be in pain.
And then you will die.
I’m not dead yet, and despite that pain I am trying to ease myself off the edge.
People like me feel worse. Others let it out in a way. They smoke or drink or play poker even if it’s on the porch or by the light of the garage. But people like me sit with our ache. We think we deserve the pain that comes with everything.
We collapse in on our own righteousness.
We don’t allow ourselves vices because we don’t deserve to have our pain eased and are determined not to add to our rotting souls with things that might come back to haunt us.
I sit here drinking my water like alcohol, because I most ardently wish it was.
I want you to know that I am writing this as a partially healed man. Before, when my wounds were wide, I could not write about anything else and yet each sentence was a burden I had to bare. I could think of nothing else whether it was pen to paper or pixels to a screen. To quote Mr. Dean Koontz, “ ‘writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy.’ ” I agree with much of his teachings, but on this I feel he has simplified much of what it takes to come forth so solidly. So I gave up writing altogether and abandoned my many ideas and thoughts. So listen to me when I say that you will never, never, be yourself if you do not heal.
If you do not rest.
If you do not care.
However, if it is your solemn desire -like mine- to display for the masses the pain that comes before you die, I commend you. For all of us know that our wounds will be open for all time; immortalized in our craft.
So with that said: Let’s begin
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