the pain is healing me

if 2024 was all about physical health; heart holes and blood draws, then as that year curdled and bled into this one, 2025 became about psychic health. they soaked into one another, the issues swirling around and mirroring each other. it was cartesian dualism that for centuries led us to mistakenly believe that the mind and body can be easily partitioned.

i am reminded of a sketch by Yoshitomo Nara: Untitled (2001). a girls head lies on the ground in the bottom corner of the paper, the page torn where the rest of her body would be. the text translates (approximately) to pushed down in the neon light.

cartesian philosophy was really handy for capitalism and primitive accumulation; viewing ones body as a machine operated by the mind conditioned human beings to becoming a workforce. the body was denigrated and dissociated from spirituality and the effects of this still ripple through cultures and people.

despite humanities advancements and books like (notably problematic) the body keeps the score on the link between trauma and the body I have always felt like that yoshitomo nara drawing. its not that she doesn’t have a body, its that there isn’t even paper there for one to be drawn.

a recurring theme for me this year is understanding my neuroses, feeling like I have got to the bottom of the why, yet not knowing what to do with that. with all the insight i have accumulated over the years i am unable to change the way i feel, and i continue to suffer.

the first essay i published here, on bad feelings, was written a couple years ago on my birthday and spoke about the repression of negative emotions. once again i am reckoning with having to embrace a variation of this. its actually a little disturbing to me how many times i need to remind myself of this lesson; the fact its so deeply entrenched.

in trauma stabilisation therapy i am reminded of something i had already figured out by myself a few months ago (yeah, thats a pat on the back for myself). you are asked to circle behaviours on a mind map that you adopted: self harm, substance abuse, eating disorders, panic attacks, dissociation (you get the idea).

you’re then asked to reflect on the way these behaviours helped you.

a few months ago i had this epiphany, and i don’t know what sparked or facilitated it apart from an increasing withdrawal from the world and letting go of what i thought people wanted from me. i had relapsed and was feeling a lot of shame attached to that, i was preoccupied with the fact it was a Wrong thing to be doing. maybe i was sick of trying to be Good. of not being Fixed and Healed. because i suddenly felt deep inside me that i was entitled to this relapse, given everything that had happened in the last few months, years. i caved into the feeling. i accepted that this was real. this is who i am.

i am not saying that self destructive and debilitating coping mechanisms are good long term strategies, but for me personally i had to stop fighting them to begin to replace them, because, like i said years ago, they’re a symptom.

its who i am - but not only who i am. when i speak about embracing pain i mean as part of a larger picture of myself. i am someone who hurts myself and then laughs and makes my coworkers laugh the next day. i don’t need to choose between the two versions of myself. i can feel comforted when i accept i’m having a bad day. i can be furious and then be tender. pain is not so far from joy.

I found this passage from Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra today:

the funny thing is i always knew this. i knew it in my body. as a child and teenager i would sometimes watch the wind stir the leaves on the trees outside the windows and cry for reasons i could not understand, i knew it was something to do with the beauty of it, but i felt the pain of it in my body, and my body physically reacted.

to be divorced from your body, or to put on a front as a way to deal with your feelings will only corrupt and rot your soul. i have felt my ghost decaying like this all my life and i am tentatively hoping this year that changes. i feel like the pain is healing me. if we accept that pain and joy are closer to each other than we initially thought, we can coast this slippage between the two with greater ease, as they soak and swirl into each other, all dualisms, binaries and boundaries perforating and disintegrating.