Affliction

Despite the title of this post - I will celebrate the day. Another snow day - another Winter Wonderland outside to revel in all day. Another day at my laptop - the place I feel so comfortable at these days.

Yesterday was a difficult day. I had to work until 9PM for conferences and did not see one parent. Sad. The roads were horrible coming home. You would think when your car is only a few years old, has good tires and sand bags in the back that it would stop when you pressed on the brakes - but I always feel like I'm the only one sliding into intersections and pumping the pedal and saying nasty words to my little Rav. It was harrowing.

But the worst part of the day was that, for unknown reasons, I could barely walk yesterday. My left hip was in so much pain that I had to hobble slowly through the halls. Embarrassing. If I'd just sprained my ankle, say - I could just say - I sprained my ankle. But when everyone asked what happened - uh- I don't know!!! The two cortisone injections rejected their role and betrayed me. It's too long of a story to tell. Back to the doctor today.

Somehow I am slowly realizing how this experience is changing me, and I have hope that I am learning something. I was reading some essays by the famous French writer Simone Weil. She wrote :

Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attentuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain. . . and nothing else has the power to chain down our thoughts.

Affliction is something specific and impossible to compare with anything else, just as nothing can convey the idea of sound to the deaf and dumb. And, as for those who have themselves been mutilated by affliction, they are in no state to help anyone at all and are almost incapable of even wishing to do so. Thus, compassion for the afflicted in an impossiblity.

THAT'S what bothers me the most. The way pain causes you to be self-absorbed and unable to be of use to anyone. Yesterday when one of my students showed up at my door during my lunch crying and kicking the wall because someone took his lunch - I had to practically crawl up the stairs and down the long hallway to investigate the problem. I wasn't as interested in solving his pain as my own. I hate that.

Weil continues: Affliction causes God to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell.

I think she is describing depression here and I would agree. Depression to me felt like God had abandoned me. However, I am recognizing how pain can easily lead to depression.

Affliction hardens and discourages because, like a red-hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the contempt, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt and defilement which crime logically should produce but actually does not.

The people you love and live with get to suffer too. As much as I try not to whine and cry, my husband has commented on my tendancy to be in bad moods these past few months. I want to say "Duh!" But then again, it seems unfair that he should have to suffer along with me. Being a man, he wants to fix it, but even the four doctors I've been to can't seem to do that - yet.

I wrote this before I read Weil, but we seem to concur:

Affliction

Pain

physical, bodily pain

grinds your spirit

scarifies your soul

harasses your plans

hounds your brain

vexes your senses.

Pain

give me morphine

give me oxycontin

give me knowledge

walking, moving

spread out my limbs

give me my life again.

Pain

give me doctor

without a damned perscription

an expert on a real body

look at me, move my parts

discover my affliction

take my insurance.

Pain

make me understand

what it's for

the reason I have this human

fallible, fragile body

what can I learn

from pain?