I hope his next life is filled with the bunnies he loved.
Pain. It’s physical. It’s emotional. It’s constant or fleeting, sharp or dull, visible or hidden. But pain is pain; and someone else’s pain is not ours to judge.
Sometimes pain pushes us to seek out greater pain. When the internal wounds of past trauma, abuse, rejection, loss, failure, abandonment or mental illness become too much to bear, we may seek out physical pain. It is a new sensation to distract us from the psychological pain we feel, but cannot see; and often cannot verbalize. The physical pain, like that which endurance athletes, or those who play a violent or dangerous sport, is nothing to someone who has lived a lifetime of internal ‘dis-ease.’ Extreme athletes who easily tolerate, and seek out, the pain of dehydration, hallucinations, bleeding palms or feet, muscles that refuse to move, bones that are broken but still in use, are illustrations of this phenomenon. And, I imagine for many, it is this struggle that leads them to such challenges in the first place. Internal pain is so devastating but easy to hide; the physical pain of an ultra-marathon or Ironman or NFL football game, is nothing to someone who has endured the pain of unresolved trauma or mental illness, on their own, for a lifetime. To them, it’s merely torn flesh, broken bones, knocked out teeth or kidneys screaming for more water. It can be cured with ice, Advil, surgery, or rest. The internal scars are not so easy to cure, and often go unacknowledged. But it leads many to over-perform to the extent that other humans see them as immortal: immune to the conditions that would kill any average individual. They are superheroes on the outside. Inside, they are children trapped in the screenplay of the emotional scars that got them there.
Trauma, and the struggle of mental illness, scars the soul. It leaves a dark, festering cyst on the bright spirit inside. As the cyst grows, it pushes on you from the inside. It speaks to you: “RUN! Run faster, run harder, run farther!” You are not good enough, strong enough, capable enough, until you are so tired from running (biking, swimming, paddling, rock climbing) that the cyst stops talking for a while because your body is on the brink of collapse. But when you stop, because we all have to stop eventually, the cyst wakes up and starts the monkey chatter again.
“Why didn’t you do better? Why didn’t you do more? You’re a moron. You’re a fucking pussy and a lazy ass. You’ll never amount to anything.” So you put your literal, or metaphorical, sneakers back on and start running again.
“I’m not a pussy. I’m not a lazy ass. Look at what I just did!” you tell the cyst when you get home and collapse into a pile of fatigue. And the cyst is quiet because you proved it wrong. For a very short while.
“You’re getting fat. No one will love you. You’ll never be able to support yourself doing (fill in the blank) job. You’re never going to amount to anything. You’re gonna be eating cat food out of the can, alone, by the time you’re 40,” the invisible voice says.
So you lace up the sneakers, and head out again. And again. And again. You are a caricature: “Run, Forest! Run!” You keep going and going at 110%, even though the people who love you (“do they really?” the cyst snidely replies…) tell you, “Please stop running. Please let me help.”
But you keep running. “I don’t need help. I can do this on my own.” Because you always have. But what you don’t realize is that as you beat the shit out of your body on a daily basis, getting bigger faster stronger, so does the cyst inside. Because strong quads, big biceps and the endurance to run for days without failing, don’t do anything to get rid of the shit that plagues your soul. You feel physically invincible, but the mark on your soul does not budge. As Dr. Seuss said, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
To get to that festering wound, you must sit. You must sit still and listen to its bullshit, self-destructing, speeches till it runs out of words. And when it finally runs out of words, you must give it new words to say: “It wasn’t my fault.” “I am good enough.” “I deserve to be happy.” “I have nothing to prove.” “It is out of my control.”
So you sit. The sitting can kill you; or it can save you. You sit with the ones you love, you sit with a therappist, you sit alone, you sit with “god.” And you listen to what comes up. Is the cyst still talking?
“Nice try asshole. You’re still a fuck up,” it says.
Let it keep talking it’s bullshit, eventually it will slow down or take a break long enough for you to get a few positive words in. It’s like that person down the street who just talks and talks and talks, and doesn’t ever ask a word about you, or your life, or even listen to any words that you actually manage to get into the conversation. That never-ending bullshit-talk is their form of running. If they just keep talking nonsense, they never have to talk about, (or think, or do), things of substance. I don’t want that person in my life; those people are just plain exhausting.
But learning to replace the old script with something new takes time, focus and self reflection. And it’s hard to be focused and self-reflective when you’re looking at your watch to see how many miles you’ve gone or how fast your pace. And if you spend all your time running, you obviously don’t have time to sit still and write a new mental script for yourself. But it’s like building a body that can survive and compete in endurance sports like triathlons: it’s in the exercise portion that you break down the muscle fibers; it’s in the rest periods that the muscle rebuilds into something stronger. If you never give your body a chance to rest and rebuild, you are just in a constant state of self-destruction.
I know this, because I am a “runner.” Luckily, many years ago, I had a good friend who was brave enough to be honest with me and point out my trail of destruction. It hurt, but I will love her forever for it. And then other friends jumped in to help me find a different trail to follow – one that led inside. “Running” the new trail hurt more than any physical pain I ever endured, but it was a trail that led me to a place where moderation was possible and sitting in my emotions did not feel like torture. I still run, (and exercise to a degree of what some would find excessive), but I no longer run from the demons inside. I run to stay strong, to feel strong, to look the new demons in the face and say: “You are not me.”
I lost someone last night who was a runner; an old, dear friend who struggled with a lifetime of pain and untreated mental illness. He was a human of superior strength, determination and endurance: college football player, incredible triathlete, super high powered lawyer with dual law and business degrees from Northwestern, fearless in any situation, most loyal of friends, and generous to a fault. But to those of us who knew the real him, he was a lost boy struggling to find his way through a dense forest of pain and loss.
Many years ago, he bought me my first surfboard when he watched me step off the trail of self-destruction, and start my painful limp down a trail that didn’t include running away from my problems. It was a trail that led to a whole bunch of sitting and reflecting and releasing and re-writing the script of my soul. He bought me that surfboard as a reward for finding the strength to just SIT THE FUCK DOWN and look my demons in the face till they were the first ones to look away.
And that first surfboard saved me. He saved me and that board gave me reason to live. On the water, I didn’t have to run from the demons that chased me; demons can’t swim. When learning to surf, I was forced to sit, wait and watch for the right wave. I couldn’t force anything. The ocean was in charge. And when I would finally catch a decent ride, I felt like I was flying; like nothing had ever happened before that moment, and I had no thoughts of what lie in the future. I was in the moment for the first time in my life. I was free from the fear and anxiety that dictated my every move on land. On the water, I was free and safe; and, if i died by shark attack, it was better than by the demons inside.
I still have that board. But I no longer have that friend. He ran too far, too fast, too hard. I’m finding solace in the knowledge that he is no longer running. He can finally rest. In peace.
