I'm Bored of the Pain

Ending the cycle of martyrdom

"Life is too important to be taken seriously." - Oscar Wilde

I’m tired of hearing about how hard everything is.

I’m tired of feeling like I have to justify my existence by talking about how hard everything is. It’s like I’m carrying around this psychic debt from birth. I need to stand in front of a council of obstinate angels and explain my case. “Sir/Madam/Angelselves, I promise that I have not slept in for years. I don’t eat unless it’s leftovers from a baby's plate. I abuse my body in the name of a higher calling. I know pain, and more importantly, pain knows me. In fact, pain is sick of hearing from me. It wants me to find something else to feel. Please, tell me, am I going to be allowed to continue breathing?”

I stopped going to mom groups, in part, because suffering seemed to be our only commonality. Years ago women didn’t have contraceptives and family planning and easy access to abortion. Having children was not a choice that could be agonized over. It was a fact of life. But we live in a different time. We made the choice to have children. We willingly took on the burden of being another human being’s entire world. We gave up easy Sundays and guilt free Netflix binges and sleep and free time and partying into the night and not having to worry about anything but ourselves. And God, it was hard. It was hard. Can’t you see how hard it is?

We anointed ourselves with our suffering.

I was so bored.

And I found that the more I focused on how hard things were, the worse I felt. My mind became wrapped into an obsession with difficulty. Sometimes I felt like I needed to explain how hard it was to have a baby in order to justify asking for help. Sometimes it was because I was dealing with difficult emotions. But the end result was the same. My life became about hardness, and suffering, and any enjoyable morsel that I experienced soon disappeared into the maw of this beast. I couldn’t experience too much happiness. Happiness was the sacrifice.

The first two or three months of the baby’s life felt easy. I didn’t have post-partum depression. I had post-partum euphoria. Every time I saw my child I saw not only her, but a path toward heaven. I saw a way out of the endless, nihilistic loop I’d consigned myself. But as the months passed I convinced myself to find new burdens and new little pains.

I stopped writing. I stopped reading. I stopped eating healthy and exercising. I stopped doing most things that I enjoyed, because I (so I told myself) was just so focused on my baby and so tired that I just couldn’t possibly write. I would have to put it aside and return to it when she was older. I thought I could be a writer and a baby mother, but that was before I had the child. That was before I understood. I had shot too far. My dreams were threads that were straining to reach out into the sky, and they were disappearing from the exhaustion. Dreams? Let’s not even call them dreams. Maybe they were once, but now they’re starting to look more like roadkill.

When I tried to turn my laptop on and write, a headache flared up at the base of my neck. My joints screeched. My brain buzzed. Oh, I am just so burnt out. I couldn’t possibly. So I’d close the laptop and let a part of myself flake away and die.

If you think like a martyr, pretty soon you become one.

Sometimes we like to tell ourselves little stories about our lives. It’s these stories that give shape and skin to our days. It provides a narration to follow so that we can understand ourselves. The stories are visceral and convincing. They can influence our moods and habits, and even the way that we carry our body.

But we often forget that they’re just stories.

I was trying so hard to justify my suffering that I couldn’t enjoy the quiet stroller rides in the morning, or the way that my baby’s entire body shook with laughter when she was enjoying herself. I had been given a soft and good thing, a cherished gift, and yet I felt like I was drowning underneath it.

Did anyone promise us that life was supposed to be easy? Did they tell us that life was supposed to be fair? Life was not meant to be spent lounging in bed and watching Netflix. We aren’t children who can bang our fists and demand something light and sweet from God.

Be honest with yourself.

Even if you got it, you wouldn’t want it. 

I’m not even convinced that people who are rich, or famous, or have certain privileges have life that’s easier. I think many of them just have different problems, more esoteric pains, grander ways to blow up their lives. I’ve read enough about the lives of successful people to know that suffering is not something that shrivels up and dies in the presence of wealth. There isn’t a way to escape the pain of being human. No golden gates or hilltop mansion that can elevate you from dealing with the prison you built for yourself inside your skin.

I don’t actually have any real advice. I’m a writer. I think in stories.

So I changed the story.

I just decided that I was sick of being someone who was sick and tired all the time. I was sick of thinking about how hard everything was. I decided that I was going to be a writer no matter what. I decided that I was going to be a woman who could coordinate cute outfits for her daughter, and take her swimming and to get snow cones afterwards. I would smile when she smiled at me. I would enjoy each moment, even getting up earlier than I wanted, or Samantha trying to push her plate off her highchair.

I’d embrace the pain because it meant that I was still alive. A hard moment was not something to be endured. It was something to be celebrated.

---

The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.