The Human Condition of Sorts: As Told Through Poetry and Written Word
Poetry & Ramblings
I’m so gentle, I leave you to drink at the watering hole.
I am made of volatile materials and wonder if it will incapacitate you to take some of me.
What rubies have you pilfered before mine resided inside, and how pure were they?
Was their blood blackened from lack of oxygen and light?
How sweet was their life?
I’d ask a favor, to drink me entirely dry, but you leave before you’re even satiated.
I’ve discovered the nature of suffering this year. It’s not as if I’d never suffered myself or that I was somehow naïve to the definition of the word, rather I’ve happened upon the quite discreet philosophical nature of suffering. We’ve all endured some form of suffering, specific to each of us, to our circumstances, in relation to our fears, threatening our livelihood and contentedness in some way. And though we’ve all acquainted ourselves with it and, theoretically speaking, seen its face, my suffering looks nothing like yours. They are, perhaps, kin as they only share the word like a stubbornly everlasting surname, but that’s the extent of their parallels. I was recently discussing, mocking, really, a woman I know that had complained about her life. To place it more modernly and grammatically unappealing, “f my life”, she messaged me. As though she was in some anguish that could neither be removed nor numbed and her life, both up to this point and all she’ll experience after the dramatization of such a sentence, was either moot or inconsequential or bound to only be met with more suffering.
Here I rolled my eyes.
And I did so because I know this woman personally and, when compared to my woes, it felt as though surely, surely this was a joke. No, it wasn’t. It was merely a woman suffering in her own way, not a woman suffering meekly by comparison, just a woman suffering.
It ultimately annoyed me the barbarity of life for some and then others experience such an ease with it — like a gust of wind temporarily disturbing flowers when others have been ripped up by their very roots from a ruthless tornado — that suffering is conceived by such seemingly paltry matters; matters a child in an underdeveloped country, searching for clean water, would certainly scoff at. But that is a skewed perception. Suffering is not only valid upon comparison. There is no unspoken competition. Mine and yours look nothing alike, as I said, and yet they torture us both when they arrive. Suffering is as individual as we are. Shadows, really, taking on our shape and never able to replicate another’s.
I was wrong in my belief that suffering was somehow rationed. And only those genuinely agonizing, deeply suffering, deserve to acknowledge it. Suffering is in a gross surplus in this world, which is the cruel reality of it. And one suffering does not negate another, as the suffering are two vastly different people merely sharing the same name.
I’m learning, though, that suffering is not necessarily something healthy to acknowledge at all. Perhaps we acknowledge the emotions it pulls into the air, like dust mites from a carpet being beat, but giving it life somehow takes away for our life.
I’ve been unfurled a few thousand times,
and I know just how unattractive my spine must appear snapped and folded in such an inhuman manner. I am the same tenderness as in the womb, encapsulated in a life separate of mine. Both lost and nestled in some known spot, buried down deep with hums of my existence occasionally escaping as bubbles to the surface, so you are aware I’m still here.
“I’m still here“, I leak out and up to the very top.
If I could describe the urge that sloshes around my insides before I carry out a compulsion, I’d describe it as needing to scream for help after your vocal chords have been extracted. Or the instinct to sway at fire ants covering your body, all the while knowing if you irritate them you’re doomed to face their fiery, stinging wrath. But you do, because you think they could kill you. Because you think the urge will drown you, or pull you under, or bury you alive in some shallow grave. It feels unavoidably necessary. Urgent, even. Then relief comes over me from the compulsions; the repetitive comfort; the question mark reassurances.
“You’d tell me if you wanted another?” “You’d tell me if you weren’t attracted to me anymore, wouldn’t you?” “Don’t you think you should be with another? But I’m not good enough. You deserve someone good enough.”
And I could make him the happiest he’s ever been, and I’m modest, not cocky, here when I say I do make him the happiest he’s ever been. His family has echoed this like a chorus to the things he said to me too many times to count.
Some of my compulsions include picking at things, but most are hidden. I’ve always been so ashamed of them, of the intrusive thoughts, the nature of my ruminations and themes. I’ve felt like a pervert, a monster, someone worthy of exile from society. Despite never doing anything wrong. Even that sentence, in all its confidence, is anxiety-inducing for me, because what if I do something wrong in the future? Because of the confidence, maybe I’m meant to fail such a statement. I feel the need to not only analyze everything, but to clarify all that which causes anxiety until I’m comfortable with the new arrangements of things.
I know this post isn’t very relatable to many, but it pays homage to the very real fact mental illness comes in such varying forms. Most are so good at concealing themselves from those around their “host”, that it’s devalued as any true struggle. And the stigma and the shame and the bottling back up of it, remains until some breaking point is arrived at; sometimes then it is the vehicle to drastic, permanent measures. And you can never get them back.
I think a huge misconception for loved ones of those battling mental illness is you have to understand. That’s not it. We don’t expect understanding — I speak widely and broadly when I say, more than that we need encouragement and an ear, every now and again, and support. Support to get better, to seek help, to desire help, to not feel….less than. We don’t expect you to understand because we are aware you might not have experienced it.
My fiance doesn’t completely comprehend my OCD. He’s had a form of Pure-O a few years back, coupled with agoraphobia and depression; but my particular themes and compulsions, he doesn’t understand. But I’ve never been upset by that. One of the most special things he’s ever done is he joined a few Facebook groups for OCD sufferers. I don’t know if he knows just how paramount that is in my mind, but seeing him try to understand and support me and want me to get help was all I needed to see.
The Human Condition of Sorts: As Told Through Poetry and Written Word 