So, we are all broken. And we will all always be broken. It’s part of living as a human, right? We can keep growing and healing, and we should keep growing and healing, but we will never reach the end of that process, and we really need to make our peace with that. It’s a very beautiful thing really. To never be done.
I love to find all the ways I am broken. Partly because I am on an endless quest to become better, but also because I just really enjoy tending to my wounds. If I ever accidentally hurt myself, I get a little bit excited at the opportunity to clean and dress and care for my wound. Bloody ones are always the best, of course. When you can really see why it hurts, and then you can monitor it healing, shrinking, becoming a little scar that will always tell its tale.
This tasty abrasion from 2009 was a personal favourite of mine. A good amount of surface area to tend without getting too serious.
But an altogether different creature is the mystery wound. The pain that you don’t understand at all. You have no idea where it’s coming from, what you might have done to cause it, or what kind of wound it might be. Mystery wounds can be a pain in the arse, quite frankly. Even when that’s not where they are. Sure, you can ponder what happened yesterday, or the day before, or seven years ago. You can hypothesise. But then, generally, you just have to go through a process of trial and error. So many of us must live with mystery wounds just because it’s too much effort to figure out what they are.
Mystery wounds generally aren’t a big issue for me these days. They used to be a very big issue. I’ve spent many years of my life wondering what the fuck is wrong with me in a whole plethora of ways. But gradually, through a variety of methods, they have found ways to reveal themselves to me. And so, mostly, when something hurts, I know roughly what I’m dealing with.
But a peculiarity has developed in my life recently. I’m not sure if it’s the pregnancy hormones to blame or, perhaps, more mundanely, my boyfriend and I are just getting to a stage in our relationship where new monsters are surfacing, but I’ve found myself facing emotional triggers that I have no fucking clue about.
So I just sit there, like, “I am feeling something unpleasant.” What is it? “I don’t know.” Why are you feeling it? “I don’t know.” What are you going to do about it? “I don’t know.” Well, I don’t think I can help you.
It’s intriguing. I’m intrigued. I have my attention.