Author: Michelle

Throw your pain in the river
Leave your pain in the river
To be washed away slow

And we walked without words
And we walked with our lives
—PJ Harvey/The River

Some of us  hold on to everything.

OK. Let’s put that into the first person where it belongs.

I am a person who tends to want to hold on to everything.

Emotions.
Shoes.
Clothes in different sizes.
Empty used envelopes.
Old boyfriends.
Memories.
Books.

We all know how much better, how much cleaner we feel when we get rid of old junk. When we empty the shelves of clutter. Sometimes we find it difficult to start throwing things away, even though we know we will feel better without the clutter around us. Physical clutter, physical goods, are easy to deal with compared to any of the junk we carry around  inside of our heads.

If your head is anything like mine, and hopefully it isn’t, you have a lot of dark corners and cobwebs in there. A lot of little piles of emotional baggage that need attention. Some of them carefully covered up so I can’t see them.

And yes, even pain. Why would anyone want to hold on to pain?  I know I don’t usually mean to, but still there are some things that I struggle to set free. Even if they hurt. Sometimes a memory is so important to me that I’m afraid that letting go of the hurt will make me lose the entire memory. Sometimes I think if I hold on, I can resolve the issue that is causing the pain. Usually it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes the pain involves a person. It’s really difficult to let go of someone you care about. I’m not sure how successful I’ve ever been at it. Maybe I’ve just been lucky I haven’t needed to very often.

Sometimes I think I’ve let go of  pain when I’ve really just hidden it away very carefully. You can stuff a pain down pretty deep and almost but not quite forget about it. That sort of pain tends to leak out around the edges in all kinds of ways, like any other thing you try to ignore. Maybe not acknowledging it gives it a power it doesn’t have otherwise. Makes it more treacherous. Makes you do things you shouldn’t do to compensate. Maybe  over eat or self-medicate in other ways. Maybe you become compulsive about exercise. Maybe you find other, more creative ways to abuse yourself. I’m quite clever at it. The pain doesn’t feel as acute when it’s buried, but it’s still there. Just waiting. It’s a slow poison. Time release badness.

I’ve been known to deny that pain even exists. That’s common with mental pain. I managed to do it with physical pain, when I was getting treated for a badly burned arm. Therapists love it when you would rather pass out than admit you hurt. Medical people don’t like it when you go into shock. Neither do mothers.  I didn’t really recognize what I was feeling as pain though. I may be smart in a lot of ways, but dealing with pain is really not something I’m good at. I would rather just avoid if I possibly can.

Other times, I know I hurt and choose to ignore it. Usually that involves physical pain. A few years ago, I was training for a half marathon and got plantar fasciitis a few months before the race.  I realized what it was and knew I should stop running. I didn’t run for a few weeks, and then cut back a little on my pace. I was so focused on the goal of the race that any possibility of long term damage was not something I was willing to consider.  I finally finished up, limping through the 13 miles, and haven’t been able to run again since. It was 6 or 8 months before I could walk quickly or even ride a bike. I was an idiot. Pain is a signal that something is wrong. If you don’t honor that, pain will kick you in the ass until you do.

If you don’t deal with it, pain will always win.

It’s an easy process to deal with physical pain. You see a doctor, a physical therapist. You rest the injured part, or get cortisone shots. You pamper yourself a little until you heal. Sometimes it’s more complicated than that, and sometimes the treatment doesn’t cure the pain entirely,  but the process for getting better tends to follow the same route.

Letting go of emotional pain isn’t as obvious.  Sometimes you have to have help. From a friend, or a lover. Or even a psychologist or counselor. A lot of times you can deal with it on your own if you’re willing to acknowledge it. It can be as simple as forgiveness, or as simple as admitting to yourself that you hurt and being willing to feel the pain. No one likes to feel pain, but you can’t let it go until you do.

It would be nice if we could all just go swimming.

And leave it all in the river.

We are we are we are we are the Order of the Fork
And each and every one of us will stick it to the rest of us
We are we are we are we are the Order of the Fork

–Camp Song

When I am faced with a person or situation which  annoys me, I will often say that it  makes me want to poke them in the eye with a fork.  If they irritate me a lot, it’s a hot fork. I thought I’d share some of the people who irritate me, and assign a fork-scale to the level of provocation.

Full disclosure:   I don’t actually ever poke anyone in the eye. Not even without a fork. It’s like when I say I’m going to open a vein when a situation is endlessly upsetting. It’s a rhetorical blood letting and a rhetorical fork.

Oooh. Rhetorical Fork would be a good band name!

Additional disclosure: sometimes the person I want to poke in the eye the most is myself.

So here’s the Fork Scale of Irritation:

Cold fork = Eh, I’d poke them in the eye,  but not very hard. Mildly annoying. Maybe I’d just roll my eyes at them instead. Just barely worth a poke in the eye.

Fork, without a modifier = they irritate me plenty.

Molten fork = There is no way they could ever be poked hard enough to appease my annoyance. Maybe I would even prefer to use  a  pitchfork.

Dick Cheney. Molten
This dude is evil.  No, he’s Evil. Pronounced eeee-ville like Vincent Price. He shot a buddy in the face and didn’t think that called for an apology. He can’t possibly be a human being. He has to be a really poorly executed android. A prototype for simulating human feelings gone horribly wrong. I’d poke him in the eye with a red-hot fork and then knee him in the groin just for fun.   Wearing spiked knee pads. I just do not care for the man.

People who never shut up. Fork
There was someone I used to work with who I had to ask to please stop talking on an almost daily basis. She never did. She was completely oblivious to non-verbal cues such as sobbing, and banging my head on the desk. I always had to ask her to stop talking, generally after she asked me if I was mad at her. To make things worse, she was at her chattiest first thing in the morning. Before I was caffeinated. When I don’t even like to talk to myself. It was like being in a mesh enclosure with 1000 house flies. They don’t hurt you, but OHMYGODPLEASESTOPTHEBUZZINGPLEASE. Or maybe I should have just gotten a fly swatter.

Taylor Swift/Avril Lavigne. Cold
Do they really think no one has noticed that they  are the same person?

Fred Meyer stores that have been remodeled.  Fork
Clearly usability was not part of the plan for these remodels. They’ve staggered the aisles to cause increased cart congestion at twice the number of places that had it previously. They’ve also rearranged the entire store for maximum inability to find products. The aisles are of full of sobbing families who can’t find the bread and even if they knew where it was, they wouldn’t be able to get past the piles of burning shopping carts to get there. The plan was apparently to increase sales by preventing people from ever being able to leave the stores. Kudos.