Healing Pain

This week has been tough. I have been at my end more times then I can count...each time swearing I am going to give up. "Life in my eating disorder was better than this." I nostalgically think back to those days with a feeding tube in my nose, down my throat, and recall much more joy then I actually possessed. So, after giving myself a brief reality check, or at least throwing myself a small pity party, I stand back up and keep fighting. I don't really have a choice. Therapists would say quite the opposite. "Getting better is completely your choice." "No one can make you get better, you have to want it." Even though I roll my eyes even as I type out those words, I know they hold alot of truth. HOWEVER, in many ways I don't feel like I do have a choice. I feel like the choice is being made for me...because to do anything else would be choosing to torture the ones around me that I love so much...but also would be throwing away any chance of a future, a family, and the life I so desperately long for. Some days it feels like more then I can stand. Some days it seems like dying would be the easy way out, because living life in the here and the now is torture. I lived through all the crap that has happened in my life once...and it seems horribly cruel and unreasonable to have to relive it through flashbacks. To have secrets buried so deep for so long only to be brought to the surface, begging for words to be attached to what words could never express, is exhausting. How could there be so much silence for so long...and still there be such vivid pictures? How could I have "forgotten" so much only to have it resuscitated. And its hard to not have a clear understanding of what freedom or "living" truly feels like. Some days I wonder if maintaining the fight would take less determined perseverance if I knew what it felt like to feel free. Then at least I would know the joy of freedom will outweigh the pain of the fight...or the pain of facing the past.

It's quite odd how much Grey's Anatomy inspires me to write. I think the beginning and ending monologues are there to inspire thought and obviously to stir curiosity...but I don't know if its normal for them inspire me as much as they do. I personally like to attribute it to all the therapy I am in...what I won't admit is that it has always had this affect on me. All that said, I just finished watching the season premiere. So, bear with me.

So Derek Shepherd, a world renown brain surgeon, has just come back to working after getting shot by a killer who was loose in the hospital last season. Anyway, Derek came back and took on this patient who had a brain tumor that was inoperable... oh but not for Derek Shepherd. : ). The surgery that was required however was very invasive and would require an unbearably painful recovery. The had to literally cut the kids face in half and break his jaw to get into his brain. So, very very painful. So Derek is paged because the kid had come out of surgery but is in so much pain that he is FREAKING out. The pain was literally driving him insane.



So, this is what Derek says to the patient, Greg: "You have to listen to me Greg. This is the fight, this is the fight. The pain is going to stop and we are going to help you until it does. This is your fight. The tumor's not driving anymore, you are. You are in the drivers seat. Life that's in your head, you get if you fight, got it?" Then Derek turns to Greg's mom, who is a hot mess, and says: "This is pain. It's not a dying pain. This is a healing pain. This is a victory pain. You won. We won."

I got chills. Literally. You could see in this kids eyes the pain...the pain that was debilitating. Derek never denied the pain. The pain was freaking real. The pain was enough to bring anyone to hysterics. I know I may be reading into it but the pain wasn't weak. The pain was just that, pain. Awful, excruciating, make you go crazy, pain. They were pumping him full of morphine but it could only do so much...the morphine couldn't make his broken jaw go away. The morphine couldn't sew his tongue back together and magically reduce the swelling. In many ways the kid could have looked back to the time before the surgery and say he felt much better before...when it was hiding away, killing him slowly. It's the same thing for me I guess. The pain in healing at times feels much worse than the pain of staying sick, hiding from the secrets your mind doesn't want to feel. The truth of the matter was that the tumor would have killed him...and I believe this eating disorder would have killed me. And the removing of my "tumor" tore apart so much in me...and when they sewed me back together the evidence was finally there for the world to see. That which was hiding, sucking the life away, is exposed...and healing from it is just the beginning of the deep, heart breaking pain. The boy had a choice...let the pain of removing the tumor drive him to kill himself...or face the pain for days, weeks, months...maybe even years on end...believing that one day, life on the other side will be worth the fight. It was a choice only He could make...its a choice that only I can choose for myself. But what was interesting was that He didn't only address Greg. He also addressed Greg's mom. Greg wasn't fighting alone...he couldn't fight alone. With a pain and a hurt and a healing so intense, no one can do it alone.
"This is pain. It's not a dying pain. This is a healing pain. This is a victory pain. You won. We won."