A Perpetual Sore Wound

(To be revised.)

It’s getting easier, not because I’m growing, but because I know myself, I know the pattern; I’m able to bear it through, wait for it to pass. It’s easier because I foresee its coming, I understand its passing and know its timing. It used to be an energy-sapping total wear-down because I would fight it when it comes, but I never won the fight, and it exhausted me. Now it’s like a wound, a soreness, that I bear with, and accepted; except that I don’t accept it, because I want growth, not endurance. It’s like my headaches, where during a flare-up period I wait for the pain to pass, I wait the weeks out.

I’m a-word-that’s-more-than-aware of the map of my life. I all-body-sensationly visualize how my life, one part, connects to other parts and the whole of my life and my world. A sensitivity that is miserable. Every time I enter a sub-culture, I am transported back to that world I knew in part, and the me in those days or weeks of temporary transporting feel drawn to that world, away from my current world. Not because I love that life—it’s a life I don’t align with—or else I’d be doing everything I can to return or reach. But some aspects momentarily make me a happier version of myself, and a more free one.

And I know myself. I sit under water, it flowing over me, and the wistful nostalgia freezes me in place. 

Now I know it’s temporary. When I go back to my life as it is now, I will be removed from the temporariness, the nostalgia will fade, even if replaced by unhappiness in my current life. So I just bear through the sore hard-pressing, the low-burning wound. I know the cycle, I know the process. But each time it kills me, and I don’t want to experience this wandering sadness several times a year, to be transported to my alternative realities that I know ultimately cannot fit me. When I’m there, I want it to be part of my identity, but I know this wistfulness will fade, and I am unshakable in what I want to align with. And it’s the pain of my determination grating against the pain of my attachment to the different worlds I’ve experienced, that cause the perpetual pain, the pang in my chest I feel as I lay in bed, imagine my alternative reality, and coax myself into calmness knowing it will pass. 

But this is not an irreversible health condition. I don’t want to wait out the pain for the rest of my life, sit on planes, sit in cars looking out the window, feeling both wistfulness and determination, longing and unbelonging, feeling the dissonance of it all, the parts of my world I cannot piece together. Understanding and recognition of my fifteen-year-long pattern is not enough. I want to laugh with groundedness and a boundaried identity, be present without fully transporting myself to that sub-culture, and enjoy without an all-immersive emotional experience rooted in my innate ability to map-make (quite literally feel, not see, the geography of my life). I like understanding and bearing better than an exhausting frenzied battle, but I would like growth and groundedness better than understanding and a perpetual bearing of a wound.