Day 340 - Suffering is Not a State of Grace
It took me three hard drafts, a torrent of emotions, and a lot of failed plans to get through yesterday.
And it wasn't about Clayton.
As awful as that sounds it just wasn't.
It was this deathly weariness in the bones.
Toward the early evening, I took the kids and the dog to a wide open field where they ran around, played baseball and clambered up and down the steep concrete embankment of a city drainage ditch. I had no energy to join them so I only watched from the van while I numbly browsed Facebook.
It starts out with...
"The truth is, suffering sucks
and it can take you to a place of wanting to kill yourself,
and there’s nothing beautiful about that.
Suffering is not a state of grace.
Suffering, from my point of view,
is about a real place in a real body
where you face the other side of living.
How you choose to understand that story probably determines
how you’re going to live the rest of your life.
I feel kindred with fellow sufferers,
not because they suffer,
and not because of some absurd vortex of victimhood camaraderie,
and not because sufferers are in a state of grace,
but because they go on, they endure.
And because sometimes, the sufferer reinvents themself
— and this kind of reinvention is what misfits are so good at.
Misfits not only know a great deal about alternate and varied definitions of suffering, but misfits are also capable of alchemizing suffering, changing the energy from one form to another."
Please read the rest.
It was so comforting to feel like I found a piece of something that I belong to.
I am a misfit, the daring, glaring gypsy child of lost nomads, still homeless and trying to find my way.
Her story also gives me hope of finding meaning and treasure in the wreckage.
And even if no one else likes the story that I am telling or the way that I am telling it,...the story won't let me go. As often as I have wanted to just yield to my own dark cold waters, the story keeps me gasping with pain and sorrow and aliveness just enough that I am finally compelled to let it be a part of me and to let it be heard. And maybe it will be what saves me.
It was so comforting to feel like I found a piece of something that I belong to.
I am a misfit, the daring, glaring gypsy child of lost nomads, still homeless and trying to find my way.
Her story also gives me hope of finding meaning and treasure in the wreckage.
And even if no one else likes the story that I am telling or the way that I am telling it,...the story won't let me go. As often as I have wanted to just yield to my own dark cold waters, the story keeps me gasping with pain and sorrow and aliveness just enough that I am finally compelled to let it be a part of me and to let it be heard. And maybe it will be what saves me.
