Bubbles (Part II)
This essay is the eleventh installment in a series of 12 monthly creative essays for the year 2021 (now flowing far into 2022 because I fell behind). Each month’s topic is selected using cards from the party game Apples to Apples. This month’s card was “Bubbles,” which I initially selected as an essay topic last year. I decided to use the prompt again to share more thoughts, though I admit I used it more sparingly as a metaphor here than the first essay. Bear with me and thanks for reading!
I once read a book where one of the characters was a fortune teller. She used her divining talents to calm the nerves of the people in her small, depression-era American town, offering readings that reached answers hidden beyond the veil, and bringing comfort to grieving townsfolk.
She provided a sort of healing for her community. Still, like so many of us, she had her own wounds (very real wounds, actually — an infected cut on her leg). Over the course of the book, a common theme emerges of the fortune teller’s stubbornness to treat the injury. We discover that the wound is also a symbol, a somatization of the woman’s own deep grief. In the story, she chooses to hold on to that pain, and even let the wound fester and grow.
Why do you think we choose to let pain sit with us — to let it grow? I wonder this so often. And I see it in my life so starkly. Each morning and night I have medicine I have to take. It’s the medicine that keeps me able to lift my head off my pillow in the morning. It helps me brush my teeth or shower or get dressed. It allows me to get through my day as neither a zombie nor an anxiety-riddled mess. It brings stability. Yet each and every morning and night I have to be reminded by others (and convinced by myself) to take the medicine. So whereas I do still take the pills most of the time, I always can feel that pain lurking in the shadows. Sometimes I can ignore this. More often I’m resentful of my fragility — mad that one dose missed can so quickly return me to that pain. And scared by how at home I feel in it.
Someone told me once that this was a common feeling among patients with depression. They don’t so much feel entitled to the pain, but rather bound to honor it, as if they deserve the overwhelming sadness.
Maybe the fortune teller felt the same way about her leg — that somehow we are obligated to sit with our pain. Perhaps as some sort of penance? Or I wonder if I stay close to the pain because it’s what I know, and straying too far from home is scary. In truth I don’t know that I could conceptualize wellness, that is, an absence of pain. Sometimes pain seems far too insistent and demands to be felt. But is there ever an end to such demands?
— — —
In 2019 my dad visited me in Washington, DC for Father’s Day. I took the week off of work, and we spent those days in a rental car visiting all the tourist spots in the area. It was a pleasant visit until the end. On his last morning there, my dad and I were eating breakfast at a restaurant, and I was a mess.
My job at the time had a lot of great elements, but my poor mental health made working there challenging to say the least. I remember sitting at the breakfast table with this heavy, twisted knot in my stomach. My breath was shallow and painful, all because I didn’t want my dad to leave, and I didn’t want to go back to work with no end in sight to the stress, anxiety, anger, loneliness, and yes, pain, that my job represented.
Work had become a daily, punishing act. It forced me to confront the sting of a depression (a pain) that seemed to inevitably find me no matter where I hid. I was ashamed of my hurt, and also compelled to feel it to its greatest extent. Like the fortune teller, I was refusing to treat my wounded leg.
“Megan, are you okay?”
“I just have a stomach ache. I don’t want to go back into the office tomorrow.”
“I can tell you have a hard time with work. Why don’t you just quit?”
The conversation truly was that short. I think what I needed was the permission. Permission to lance the wound. Sometimes we can give it to ourselves and other times it takes our dad on his second cup of coffee. I cried in the restaurant, using the paper napkin wrapped around my utensils to dry my eyes.
I gave my notice at work the next day. It was hard to quit. I remember telling my boss that it was because I was planning to go to grad school. In reality, I said that because it’s much harder to look someone in the eye and admit that you have to leave because you are fundamentally unwell.
— — —
What I found after quitting is that, inextricably, there was a sort of healing in the pain as well. Pain’s intensity may be as much governed by our own personal willfulness as it is the random lots cast for each of us by the universe, but its presence nevertheless demands our attention — acknowledgement that it is really there. Once I acted on the pain, a great deal of that pressure and crowding beneath the surface was released. Bubbles, each representing an element of my pain, escaped their close quarters inside me and gently drifted away.
At the end of the book, the fortune teller agrees to receive help for her leg. In doing so, she also relieves a very real pressure. The wound is cleaned and bandaged. And she starts to heal.
That’s the thing about pain. Once it is felt, it can be let go of, and in its place, space opens up for the good to come in again. But pain demands to be felt. Pain felt is a sacrament to our own strength. We must first feel the depths of our sorrow and hurt, and feel at home in them, before we can start to heal. That is its pound of flesh.
I think I learn from my pain — both how strong I can be for enduring it, but also how joy and beauty can be found in spite of it. For some it is easy, but I suppose at some point we all must lance the wound. Then, when we are ready, we can let go, and our bubbles can rise to the surface, and the pain can leave.
