Living With Pain
and no short stories (but that has to be okay)
this post mentions suicide & suicidal ideation)
I have been in pain lately. Truthfully, my pain started years ago, when I was on a trip to South and Southeast Asia, beginning in Nepal. I’d just graduated from my MFA program (Was I feeling pain in that last year? Is that when my symptoms started? Maybe) and, although I didn’t have the money, I booked a ticket to Kathmandu and planned a four month trip through Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager, and never did, because I was scared to travel alone.
In Nepal, after mad-dashing for the visa line, I stayed at the Pleasure Home Motel, where I slept for hours drenched in the smell of incense and the sounds of guests arriving and departing one floor below. I could speak Hindi, not fluently but enough. The next morning, I immediately headed to Pokhara and then up into the mountainous jungle where I’d meet a Gurung family, whose mud hut was tucked into a tiny, cup-shaped village, surrounded by lush, noisy wilds and tamed rice paddies. I was there for nearly a month, stuck-in because of a mudslide, with intermittent electricity and no wifi. Totally cut off from the world. It was beautiful. I didn’t adventure much because I am not the adventuring type. I used to be. Now I am scared of getting eaten by animals. My CPTSD, maybe. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’ve always been scared, but for a long time I stuffed it down and compartmentalized it. Maybe the bullet changed that, and I couldn’t do it anymore.
I chastised myself for not adventuring. I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let myself be what I most wanted to be— someone who sits, who reads, who writes. I did all those things, but a voice in my head accompanied me, saying I should do other things. I read so much Virginia Woolf, I read The Odyssey, and I wrote a memoir that will never be published. I drank tea in the afternoons, prepared by Amma, and ate what Amma’s family ate. The water was boiled, not filtered. Most days I pecked through the village, then down the lengthy stone steps which descended the steep hills where the village peered out from. I admired the strange cacti and succulents, the giant leaves, the arid smell which felt out of place woven with woodsmoke and moss. On clear days the Annapurna Range cleaved the blue sky with white. A moon in whichever phase hung up on the wall of the horizon.
It was so quiet.
At night, stars emerged. I drank Raksi, a corn alcohol, and watched the rain batter the banana leaves— engorged droplets sparkled like diamonds in the generator’s bright light. Even when it was off I could make out the shapes of the droplets, as if they had little moonstone heartbeats. I always sat at the same spot on the concrete deck, and behind me Amma’s husband, who stayed in his room all the time, watched wrestling, or above me, her son playing guitar and singing Pink Floyd. All his siblings were gone; all to Dubai, electricians and carpenters.
From there, I went to a Vipassana retreat in Pokhara and spent ten days in silence, spinning stories about the people meditating with me. My mind, without any context, decided that the women who rung the bells for each meditation session were rude. Not nice. The Russian girl in my bunk wasn’t there to meditate, but was using it as a cover for something more dubious. The white guy with the sharp nose was insightful, charming. None of us spoke, and I had no reason to believe any of these things were true. My mind created it all. When the last day came and we could finally speak to one another, all my assumptions were proved baseless. Not a couple of them, but all of them. No one was who I assumed they would be.
It was two days after Vipassana that I had my wallet stolen. I was at Swayambhunath Temple, blissed out. I hadn’t yet separated my cards and passport because that night I’d be leaving for Hanoi. I carried a canvas tote from Owl Books, in Kentish Town, with an open top. When a group of women jostled me, it didn’t register until I tried to show a merchant that I had no money and found my wallet gone. Everything, gone. I truly had no money.
Existing in this world with profound trauma explodes moments and experiences into life or death situations. Someone who had lived their life feeling safe in the world may have noticed their missing wallet, freaked out, then gathered themselves. Maybe called their parents, their family. Taken some deep breaths. But for me, nothing worked out. I have been kidnapped before; I have been sexually assaulted and beat up. When I found my wallet gone, I knew I had no parents to call. No family. Reality dissolved and my emotions exploded.
My grip on reality, which had felt so strong through those days and days of meditation, completely dissolved. A sweet woman police-officer took me to her office, changed into her street clothes, and unlocked her moped. I jumped on it. We’d go to the police station, and yet I didn’t believe her, didn’t trust her. Trusted nothing. I begged her to take me back to my hostel, which we couldn’t find. We zoomed down narrow dirt paths, crushed by all the other mopeds and pedestrians and taxis and noise. I gazed longingly out at the other tourists. They snapped pictures, pointed, smiled; embraced each other. I wouldn’t make my flight to Hanoi. At the hostel, they made a copy of their copy of my passport, and over the next week I’d spend my days getting a new passport, then a new visa.
Both things took forever.
A friend wired me money. A godsend.
Another friend messaged me on Facebook, encouraging me not to give up on my trip, implying that it wasn’t a big deal, she, too, had had her wallet stolen. Flights were arranged.
I wanted to die.
Riding on the moped, I felt the overwhelming urge to die. To throw myself off the moped. A passing car nearly crushed my leg and I imagined the crushing, the death. My pain was that huge. My fear that huge. Was it in proportion with what happened? No. But it was real.
At the American Embassy, where I spent many hours sitting on plastic chairs, I was comforted by that recognizable American smell. Plastic. New carpet. Paper. I met a woman my age who’d lost her passport. She kept texting with her mother, her father, her sister. I was untethered, as I had been since my mother’s suicide, since before her suicide, since her drinking stole her away. Yet I am white. American. Wrapped in the cocoon of my privilege. The Nepali people at the embassy- they wanted to go where I was from and where I would return to, and their paths were more fraught than mine. Or were they? Amma was happy, or had seemed happy. One of the men at the embassy wore a Nirvana shirt, the one with the yellow smiley face with xx eyes. Underneath the smiley face: “Kurt Kevin.”
My culture regurgitated and longed for, yet the culture itself so harsh Kurt Kevin kills himself after finding success, because success is hollow when no one really sees you as a person.
On one of my walks down the stairs from the village a Nepali man stops me and tells me in his good English that I am blessed to be an American. That our president is good. Trump? He says, double-checking. He is good.
At the embassy a bulletin board. A flyer with a picture of a woman younger than me; American, curly hair. Wearing a backpacking pack and smiling. Her name typed below. MISSING. The flyer was two years-old.
Before my wallet was stolen I had turned a giant prayer wheel with a large, barefoot monk in a marigold robe. He smiled and looked back at me as I walked behind him, pushing one of the handles. All the prayers I sent out into the world that day. Rows and rows of prayers all spun out into the world. I was not missing. Everything was okay, and yet nothing is ok, ever.
I did end up staying— I went to Hanoi and rented an apartment with roommates. I considered living in Hanoi and teaching English. But eventually I ran into the brick wall of my credit card companies, who wouldn’t send me new cards. So, I had to go home. I scrambled, found a nanny job in Seattle, moved there, and strung together tenuous living situations for about five months. I took care of a cat with mental health issues. I had a root canal. I wrote my book proposal. I sold my book. I was awarded a Fulbright. I moved to Europe. I left my Fulbright. The pandemic happened.
And I wonder, when did the pain start? Could I have prevented the onset of my rheumatoid arthritis? Will I be in pain forever? Will I find the right medication? Will everyone give up on me? Will I go broke because I cannot work as much as I used to?
Have I ever lived without pain? Is this pain simply the physical manifestation of the intense loneliness I have felt since I was a child?
When I am in pain, when I am exhausted, what do I do? I am on my own, as I was in Kathmandu. In Hanoi. I can descend. I can feel sorry for myself, and I will, and I do. What’s so bad about some self-pity?
I took it for granted, my whole life. Not having to take medications. Not being in pain.
Some days I feel sorry for myself and wish things were different. Some days I want to get out of bed and cannot. For two whole days this week I was asleep when I was supposed to be awake, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
I feel down the lengths of questions until I lose their fabric. The questions don’t lead to answers.
Yet I try to find the answers again.
My hands are empty again.
What does it mean to live with pain? With chronic illness? I have been an alcoholic. A drug addict. I live with mental disability. But this— my body seeks to destroy my body. An echo of an old self who sought to destroy themself. A reverberation. My fault, or not my fault. Doesn’t matter.
There is no answer or solution. Only acceptance. The profound knowledge that it will change. Everything changes.
I may write about Gooseberries next time- I was going to do it this time, but I have run out of energy.