Pain does not define you.
It is merely part of your experience.
You decide whether and how pain shapes your personality and your actions.
Being real with yourself (and others) is a vacine against being a stepford human.
Pain does not define you.
It is merely part of your experience.
You decide whether and how pain shapes your personality and your actions.
Being real with yourself (and others) is a vacine against being a stepford human.
All the goodness, that spiritual food, comes from a parent’s core of happy strength.
Pain, especially chronic (never freakin ending, this must be a joke, what the heck!) pain – tends to warp that happy strength core – sucks that goodness from a parent’s soul leaving instead a whirlpool of despair.
How to stop from getting sucked deep into that whirlpool of despair?
Find a funny. Something that makes you actually, spontaneously, truly – laugh out loud.
And because you’re in pain, “normal” type humor may just not cut it.
It will likely have to be something ironically twistedly true that is utterly ridiculous in fact so the laughter is hysteria tinged. Note: cutting down as much hysteria tinge as possible is better when finding humor and your kids are with you. Hysteria is almost as freaky to our kids as them seeing us suffer.
Actively seeking funny seems phony. Until the laughter spurts without thinking. Laughing (and all those natural brain chemicals that laughter releases which make us feel happy) breaks thorny brambles of anger/frustration/sadness, making holes so the funny can also find you. Of course, it isn’t like buying an ice cream cone and getting instant yum. Finding funny and helping it find you is WORK. Because you’re in pain goddamn it, and pain simply sucks. And on its own, pain is far from funny.
You love your kids though, and that love needs laughter to thrive and be expressed so those kiddos can feel it. So personal to you, what you find funny, don’t allow meanness to get any hold – leave negativity to the pain (it’s an expert).You, as a thinking parent, make it positive with your funny. And don’t worry, most likely your funny won’t be mainstream, well yeah, because having chronic pain is not mainstream.
Meet one of my three trolls – all are my constant companions – this big guy pictured up top is probably the one who is most insecure, seemingly wanting the most attention from me. And we know that insecurity is the root of most evils.
He loves to squish his thumb into my skull trying to pop my eyeballs out. Imagine that rubber kid toy where you push in the top of the head and the eyes pop out. Funny right? Well funny enough for me.
I found this big meanie greenie (the three trolls are the “meanie greenies” they don’t deserve individual names) in the “oh my god how am I going to function today I need to get back to sleep” early hours of a morning. Just fyi, having horror dreams, me waking at the moment of being killed, are wonderful for providing the chance to do random internet searches. It was while waiting for my heart to find its way back into my chest after the horror dream grabbed it, that I happened upon images of three trolls.
To my great (and admittedly initially hysterical) amusement, I found each troll image to exemplify (to my mind, again this is as personal as can be), my three major categories of pain.
All three of these jerky fellows are having their fun right now so I’m going to see if I can nap them into calm.
How about you? Do you look for funny?
Sincerely ours in not giving in,
Renée