God and Stilettos
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Right now I am curled semi-fetal position on my bed staring out of my left eye at my very spiky shoes (which are also on my bed for some reason.) And I’m wondering, “If you stabbed yourself in the eye with a stiletto, would it get rid of your migraine?”
And this is not even a “bad” one.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s not that I need to complain really. It’s just that I find it all rather amazing – that the human mind-body complex can be under so much duress and still function mostly normally.
For instance, I was up all night last night with a strip of metal jammed behind my eyes and slipped under the skin across the top of my skull. At least, that’s what it felt like. I was 100% awake until 2am and then awake just once or twice an hour after that in that fuzzy drunken headed stupor that you get when you combine pain, exhaustion and demerol.
When I woke up this morning at six, even the grey clouds hurt my eyes. Still, the only thing I missed today was exercising at 6am. Everything else went pretty much the same. Kids to VBS. Balanced the checkbook. Emails. Recipe Planning. Grocery List. Little Girl Birthday Party Invites. Of course, Sharon had the children most of the afternoon and dinner consisted of enchilada filling that I rescued from the freezer and a bag of instant rice and beans. But still, I made it through, you know?
Although now I’m lying here contemplating my stilettos.
I wonder, “How do people worse off than I am manage to survive?” Jane with her chronic depression and severe panic attacks. Or Betty with fibromialgia–slowly losing her ability to work, to walk, watching her life span shorten ever so slightly with every extra illness caught by an exhausted immune system. Or Kristen, her sudden acute arthritis stealing her looks, her mobility, her fertility.
Maybe this is what it means to be made in the image of God – this ability to withstand, to keep on going, to function in the midst of pain and loss. Isn’t this what God does, in the middle of all our pain – the pain of God’s children? God continues, copes, thrives even. Metaphorically, on bad days, when creation is really really fucking up, maybe God grunts and lifts a leg onto the footrest of a wheelchair…or stretches stiff joints and works carefully with gnarled fingers to button up a shirt…or rolls over slowly and puts on dark glassed before turning on the light. Made in God’s image, in pain we carry on.
best post ever
from my sage/soulsister rachelle link…
thank you for this post.
physical pain and me have been old friends fo a long time. one of the good things about our long relationship is that i’m not afraid of pain anymore. at least not afraid in the sense that i use it as a measure of wether or not i will do something. i like to think of that as some measure of maturity, but i think it could fairly be a measure of mental illness in some cultures (at least our culture)
thanks for this post.
does it help the pain to know that others feel less alone reading your wise words?
I’m recording a CD and i went in to pick up a copy of what i’d done a week or 2 ago and there was a guy in there in a wheelchair who was going to record that night. turns out he used to perform a whole lot in the nineties and got paralyzed from the neck down. but he was starting to regain motion in his arms and his right hand, and this was the first thing he’d been able to do since 98. he said “it’s hard to tell people you play music when all they see is a cripple in a wheelchair, so i want to be able to give them something since my performances are lacking the same kind of motion.” (okay so he said this with a few explicit terms). prime example of someone much worse off than i am, making it. quite amazing…
God bless you Rachelle…..this is a beautiful post.
My partner lives with MS and I live with anxiety/depression. Sometimes we just prop each other up and get through another day. There is something holy about that, something that I couldn’t quite grasp until today.
Thank you.
I don’t wear heels, although I may slip into my wife’s… nevermind, I was only kidding.
Moltmann would suggest that God suffers with us. When we are in pain and suffering, God is in pain and suffering. I would assume ths means all of humanity and not just those who think, believe, and recite like we do.
Beautiful post.
i have diabetes, and there are some days in which, i just figure i need to ride it out, i find anything to laugh at, and i cry when i need to, and i know that there are bound to be some good days up ahead. and sometimes i just put my head back, close my eyes, and pretend like it is not happening…
and somehow we get through those moments, sometimes i’m not sure how…
thanks for sharing this.
I submit that it isn’t just to withstand, but to have compassion for one another somehow in the process. I don’t mean all the time (it’s impossible), but as we can and as it is needed.
What more is there to say? There’s no explanation for pain. Why do some have it and others not? I don’t know, but I do know that you help me and others to understand how it is to live with it. After reading your posting I made a search on “pain” and found the American Pain Society ( http://www.ampainsoc.org ). Through their site I found that it is estimated that 75–150 million people in the United States have a chronic pain disorder. That’s a scary thought. Thanks Rachelle for giving a voice to the pain of millions.
Rachelle
Love this post…however. Being the fashionista that I am I have a hard time picturing you in stilettos. I have mulled over this thought for awhile and it isn’t connecting for me. Will you email me the mentioned stilettos for me to see it with my own eyes? I am a little obsessive about the whole shoe thing…
Your friend the Fashion Nazi