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A profile of pain
Sep. 6th, 2012 01:14 pmIt's a high pain day today, which is not unexpected. Most of you may well want to stop reading at this point, for I'm going to take things in odd directions and not all of them are savoury.
It was dreaming of sheep with scales and evil smiles that should have warned me. Today's crop of dreams is less exotic, but all to do with childhood fears. It reminds me when, in The Voyage of the Dawntreader, all the sailors are scared of their worst dreams. I was more curious than scared when I first read it, though I tried very hard to make myself scared. I knew it had to scare me for all my friends found it terrifying, and I tried very hard. Trying almost worked.
I was a primary school kid, and I already knew that nightmares were not nearly as scary as real life. I was missing several layers of skin over swathes of my body at the time* and I had recently understood** my first pictures of the piles of bodies outside the liberated concentration camps. By 'understood' I had made that emotional leap: these were people like me, of my religion, could be my relatives, some probably were my relatives and I would never known them. If my family had been in a different place, I would not have been born, I realised then, and neither of my parents would have lived to marry. I was eight. It was also the first year a close friend had died.
Knowing how close to me dead people were meant that hurting when the air breathed over me was not a significant problem and that people looking away when they saw me was not really important at all. Nightmares were easy, because one could wake up and read a book.
I've been told so often that these are issues too big for children, but the big issues made me able to deal with the small bits of anti-Semitism and the frequent deaths of friends and relatives that the world casually threw my way. People were accusing me of things I hadn't done and they were using bad language at me, but they were not killing me. I still don't fully understand when a culture of prejudice becomes a culture of hate and murder, but I am very grateful to have only lived in the former, despite my dreams***. I will never be happy about losing friends my age, when I was so young, but at least I had some tools to cope, strange though those tools were.
I guess this is me admitting, with a certain macabre glee, that I may complain about being in pain these days and the pain is genuine and while it certainly impairs my quality of life, it's nothing compared to the pain of my childhood. Not even nearly dying can match with eczema so acute that your skin feels twenty-five different types of hurt. And the pain of my childhood was nothing compared to the pain of many adults I grew up with. So I feel miserable today and unusually loquacious about the misery, but I'm also relieved that the physical side of it isn't all day every day any more. I get very few days pain free (the life of anyone with significantly annoying chronic illness) but I get very few days like this these days. Mostly, I lead a full life.
Although if anyone tells me to put out the rubbish or wash my floor, I shall have their guts for garters. I want to do both and have wanted to do it for days and the mess that is my flat is distressing, but this situation has been building for days and little things set it off. If you want my flat to be in a state either of us can tolerate, then please invite yourself round at a time when I'm not so grumbly and spend fifteen minutes fixing things. Or wait a couple of days, for as things improve the sheer relief of it will make me do the housework despite myself and I'll pay for it physically****, but I'll be much happier that my place isn't intolerable.
This is always assuming I don't do something exceptionally stupid and take extra pain relievers, purely so that I can stop worrying about the rubbish by putting it out... How likely is this to happen? It has happened before. It will happen again. I never said I was exceptionally clever at pain management, just that I'm exceptionally used to it.
It would be nice to feel almost as if I'm an adult able to manage a household. If I complain more tomorrow, blame that rubbish going out. I will have earned the pain then, though. Today I have done nothing to earn it, hence my discomfiture.
I'm amused that I looked at my nightmare while I was in the middle of it and said to it "Your focus is wrong, you know. You can do better than that." I think my nightmare is sulking, for it then pulled out my dream coat from when I was about ten (which explains the childhood memories) and tried to make me feel bad about it. "Not right for my big shoulders," I told it, "But very good in a difficult climate and brown is a much more practical colour than the pretty red coat you've given my beautiful sister." It pulled out all stops to tell me I was in a difficult climate, so I said, "I know that already" and woke myself up.
That's another thing I learned when I went through that interesting period of my childhood: dream control. I guess this post is another form of that. Gillian as an adult inflicts her nightmares on others. I should write a real horror novel one day, just to explain why the horror people see in my fiction is only the dream kind.
*I tell people I have acute allergies and they assume that this means spots or a stomach ache. I do not disabuse them of this for the most part, although I do explain about anaphylactic shock and how we can avoid me getting it. I don't know why I'm talking about it today. Those dreams, I guess. My skin wasn't an issue in my dreams, though, for I learned to deal with it many, many years ago. As one does.
**Not seen, for I'd seen them earlier. My parents didn't believe in cosseting children, which is just as well. The 1960s was an intersting decade to be brought up an Orthodox Jew.
***And the once-off stone thrown in my teens, and the molotov cocktails much later - these were still small in the overall picture. One a related note, why on *earth* has Australia got a problem with refugees? We've always had a problem - we had a problem with refugees from the Nazis - but how did we develop it?
****As I am now, for those dishes and for all that laundry.
It was dreaming of sheep with scales and evil smiles that should have warned me. Today's crop of dreams is less exotic, but all to do with childhood fears. It reminds me when, in The Voyage of the Dawntreader, all the sailors are scared of their worst dreams. I was more curious than scared when I first read it, though I tried very hard to make myself scared. I knew it had to scare me for all my friends found it terrifying, and I tried very hard. Trying almost worked.
I was a primary school kid, and I already knew that nightmares were not nearly as scary as real life. I was missing several layers of skin over swathes of my body at the time* and I had recently understood** my first pictures of the piles of bodies outside the liberated concentration camps. By 'understood' I had made that emotional leap: these were people like me, of my religion, could be my relatives, some probably were my relatives and I would never known them. If my family had been in a different place, I would not have been born, I realised then, and neither of my parents would have lived to marry. I was eight. It was also the first year a close friend had died.
Knowing how close to me dead people were meant that hurting when the air breathed over me was not a significant problem and that people looking away when they saw me was not really important at all. Nightmares were easy, because one could wake up and read a book.
I've been told so often that these are issues too big for children, but the big issues made me able to deal with the small bits of anti-Semitism and the frequent deaths of friends and relatives that the world casually threw my way. People were accusing me of things I hadn't done and they were using bad language at me, but they were not killing me. I still don't fully understand when a culture of prejudice becomes a culture of hate and murder, but I am very grateful to have only lived in the former, despite my dreams***. I will never be happy about losing friends my age, when I was so young, but at least I had some tools to cope, strange though those tools were.
I guess this is me admitting, with a certain macabre glee, that I may complain about being in pain these days and the pain is genuine and while it certainly impairs my quality of life, it's nothing compared to the pain of my childhood. Not even nearly dying can match with eczema so acute that your skin feels twenty-five different types of hurt. And the pain of my childhood was nothing compared to the pain of many adults I grew up with. So I feel miserable today and unusually loquacious about the misery, but I'm also relieved that the physical side of it isn't all day every day any more. I get very few days pain free (the life of anyone with significantly annoying chronic illness) but I get very few days like this these days. Mostly, I lead a full life.
Although if anyone tells me to put out the rubbish or wash my floor, I shall have their guts for garters. I want to do both and have wanted to do it for days and the mess that is my flat is distressing, but this situation has been building for days and little things set it off. If you want my flat to be in a state either of us can tolerate, then please invite yourself round at a time when I'm not so grumbly and spend fifteen minutes fixing things. Or wait a couple of days, for as things improve the sheer relief of it will make me do the housework despite myself and I'll pay for it physically****, but I'll be much happier that my place isn't intolerable.
This is always assuming I don't do something exceptionally stupid and take extra pain relievers, purely so that I can stop worrying about the rubbish by putting it out... How likely is this to happen? It has happened before. It will happen again. I never said I was exceptionally clever at pain management, just that I'm exceptionally used to it.
It would be nice to feel almost as if I'm an adult able to manage a household. If I complain more tomorrow, blame that rubbish going out. I will have earned the pain then, though. Today I have done nothing to earn it, hence my discomfiture.
I'm amused that I looked at my nightmare while I was in the middle of it and said to it "Your focus is wrong, you know. You can do better than that." I think my nightmare is sulking, for it then pulled out my dream coat from when I was about ten (which explains the childhood memories) and tried to make me feel bad about it. "Not right for my big shoulders," I told it, "But very good in a difficult climate and brown is a much more practical colour than the pretty red coat you've given my beautiful sister." It pulled out all stops to tell me I was in a difficult climate, so I said, "I know that already" and woke myself up.
That's another thing I learned when I went through that interesting period of my childhood: dream control. I guess this post is another form of that. Gillian as an adult inflicts her nightmares on others. I should write a real horror novel one day, just to explain why the horror people see in my fiction is only the dream kind.
*I tell people I have acute allergies and they assume that this means spots or a stomach ache. I do not disabuse them of this for the most part, although I do explain about anaphylactic shock and how we can avoid me getting it. I don't know why I'm talking about it today. Those dreams, I guess. My skin wasn't an issue in my dreams, though, for I learned to deal with it many, many years ago. As one does.
**Not seen, for I'd seen them earlier. My parents didn't believe in cosseting children, which is just as well. The 1960s was an intersting decade to be brought up an Orthodox Jew.
***And the once-off stone thrown in my teens, and the molotov cocktails much later - these were still small in the overall picture. One a related note, why on *earth* has Australia got a problem with refugees? We've always had a problem - we had a problem with refugees from the Nazis - but how did we develop it?
****As I am now, for those dishes and for all that laundry.