The Pain

I was watching a movie with my daughter the other weekend. It was called Perks of Being wall Flower. It is one of her favorites, she has watched it over and over and over.. read the book too. So finally I watch it with her. It becomes very apparent to me that one of the main characters suffers from mental illness. To make a long story short, his best friend takes his life, the main character struggles, he is friendless, gets friends, his friends leave him, and he gets them again, and his illness worstens and eventually leads to a black out, but his sister calls the cops and they break into the house, he awakes in the hospital mental ward. Movie in a nutshell.

At the end I am a mess. I leave the room go to the basement fold towels and cry for an hour. My husband is freaked out- afraid of my crying, I assure him I am fine and send him off to the gym and continue to cry once he is gone. It wasn’t the fact that the lead had a mental illness, it his slow break down that bothered me. You see the breakdown through images that are supposed to be going through his mind. Bits of this, Bits of friendships, bits of relationship pain, coming to a end with a black out. After the police break into the house and the lead ends up in the hospital in the mental ward, the psyc doctor comes in all puppy eyed and asking “so how you doing?” etc etc uggg really that is what the Doctor can come up with??? Cause if that was me I would be saying –“Fine, what the heck am I here for?” But it wasnt the doctor that made me cry- (eventhough the Doctor’s acting was aweful) It was the kids responce….”How do I stop it?” Stop what says the doctor, “Seeing it, all their lives all the time— there is so much pain I don’t know how to not notice it, its not my pain its is them everyone, it never stops”

Before the antidepressant drugs, before I knew what was happening to me, I emailed my pastor and asked him how to deal with it. How do I deal with the pain of my brothers rejection of family and God. Why wasn’t God dealing with this. How can I deal with the pain it is causing, I was confused and didn’t understand that the pain of all those who I was praying for wasn’t mine, I needed to give it to God and let him deal with the burden, but it burdened me down and I didn’t understand under the magnitude of the pain, and you mix that with a unstable mind and you fall down some pretty deep holes you never thought existed. Months and months later on I sat in my pastor’s office with a piece of paper, I had scribbled all over the paper, notes of a mad person, analyzing a bible verse I had to understand, I had to grasp the meaning, then I could feel better, I would be ok. I had scribbled all kinds of points, questions, and rambling and in the course of the conversation I realized I wasn’t looking for a meaning, or understanding I was caught between a flight and fight moment of anxiety and thinking that understanding one simple point would bring my mind clarity. When the reality was I was caught in the cycle of pain that blinded me to what was real and what wasn’t, and I distinctly remember sitting in the office thinking —how did I get to this office and why am I here? What was my point? I was lost and again seeing the pain around me, I could not understand nor fix. A few months ago I had a bad episode – I had been sliding and I knew I was but I didn’t want to- and refused to acknowledge it, I hid it, and one night blacked out only to awaken in my bed the next morning with 7 or 8 cuts up and down my forearm I don’t really remember doing, I remember the feeling I had the night before, thinking I have made the outside look like the feeling inside, and feeling peace from the thought. I was horrified when I woke up the next morning, when I realized what I had done. I didn’t stop at that time, I after a month of hiding and trying to heal, I told my husband who freaked, but didn’t understand. Who can understand the inside of the messed up mind but another messed up mind.

I cried at the movie, because the last 5 minutes of the movie was me, I was watching my words being spoke by someone else, I watched someone else end up in the hospital on the silver screen that should have been me – had I not hid things so well. It was like an out of body experience and I was watching me. With shame, and pain, and understanding, I saw me.

It has taken me a month to talk about this movie. The previous months and things I have wrote about seem a lifetime ago, not months ago. In some ways they feel like a movie–someone else’s life, someone else’s illness. I am trying not to feel the pain of others, keeping my head down, not to see, not to notice.

Where does this put me in my walk with God? We are standing and looking at the clouds, neither moving forward, nor moving back. To move in a relationship you must feel, I do not wish to feel so I progress no where.

till next time…………………..