I used to think that emotional pain was somehow different from physical pain. As the years have passed, and as I’ve learned more about how the brain functions, I find I was mistaken.
Emotional pain and physical pain are processed in the brain by synaptic connections; and the information is stored in the brain; and the brain prompts a reaction to that pain. The connections the brain makes, and the pathway the connections take will be similar. Sometimes pain becomes attached to a memory. If the emotional pain and the physical pain happen at the same time—an ‘accident’; an assault; someone getting pushed down a stairway after receiving a near-fatal blow [I watch a lot of British cop shows]—the memory of physical pain can become attached to an emotional pain.
The Japanese boy in the image above is minutes away from dying from the radiation poisoning that killed his his sister. An illustration from a Hiroshima Diary—the encounter occurred. After the bomb destroyed Hiroshima, what was left were children wandering through the rubble, trying to find their parents, who had already been killed by falling construction debris or ‘shrapnel’; or simply had disintegrated. The teacher who wrote the Hiroshima Diary [a genre in Japan] was looking for her niece and nephew. She had been away from home when the bomb dropped; upon her arrival home, and learning about the missing children, she entered the blast range. She survived, and lived to an elderly age, scarred by radiation.
There are no winners in a nuclear war. Certain Politicians often seem to ignore this fact.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki there are ‘shadow people’ who have been ‘enshrined’. People destroyed by the blast; and before their bodies disintegrated, they provided ‘shade’ on buildings that were ‘bleached’ by the blast. The only thing remaining of these people was their shadows.
There are no winners in a nuclear war.
Lyrics from Jason Gray:
…wounded’s a part that I’ve learned to play well; though the wound may run deeper than I know how to tell.
Where pain’s an addiction that keeps me buried alive; but when it’s all that I know, I’m afraid to leave it behind. And bring my heart to every day and run the risk of fearlessly loving without running away.
I have a CD in the car, about 18 songs, that always plays while I’m driving by myself. Lyrics I want myself to remember; lyrics that help me define who I am. “Without Running Away” is on that album. Fearlessly loving, without running away, is one of my life goals.
I’ve mentioned this before, in spite of my inward desire to be anonymous; a desire that I am training toward transparency. I had a trampoline mishap in a PE class in my 3rd or 4th year of high school. I was supposed to bounce up and land on my belly; instead, I landed on my upper chest, and my legs flew backward over my head—my face on the trampoline fabric. Sort of like an Ω with my head on the right leg of the omega. I heard/felt the sound of a zipper as my vertebrae ‘popped’.
Being able to get to a doctor, there apparently was no need, in my parent’s view, for me to see a doctor. For a long time, I could not rotate my head to the side; when someone was next to me, I had to rotate like a door on hinges in order to face them.
I majored in architecture, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and we used actual pencils and paper for drawing. One spends most of their time while drafting, bent forward at the waist. By the time I graduated from college, and started building my parents’ house, I found that excavating dirt by hand was very uncomfortable. The back pain disappeared, for a time, after my future wife and I went to an evangelistic Crusade. I felt a compulsion to go to the stage despite my desire not to go. I chose obedience. I wasn’t aware of anything happening, while I was lying, embarrassed, on the stage floor. A day or three later, I realized the pain was gone. A Grace gift to encourage me on the strange Quest I had decided to take.
Three totaled automobiles; years of being a stupid contractor; working in a lumber yard and going back to drafting brought the high school injury back.
My first migraine happened in the winter of 1979; I spent a day on the floor of a house my partners and I were remodeling. Having gone to my doc, and having received pure caffeine as a medication, I continued to work on the following days, using the bathroom a lot, and my stomach being unhappy. Self-employed people don’t get sick days.
The migraines eventually became weekly, continuing until the early years of this century. I spent a lot of time on weekends in a darkened room with Blue Ice encasing my head. My brain apparently knew that I needed to work; my brain apparently considered being unconscious to be the equivalent of recreating.
The Neuropathy arrived in 2008; took up residence in the spring of 2009; and has taken residence in larger areas of my body, every two years. So, while my sensory nerves degrade, the degradation is accompanied by continual internal nerve pain. At present, I have no reflexes, and my feet no longer feel that I’m walking on a flat surface; there is an invisible ‘step’ on the underside of my feet. One of the good things is that my sciatic nerves no longer function well—I no longer have sciatica. I no longer wear a black wrestling glove to deal with tendonitis in my right hand.
The above is way more than I usually say. I refuse to define myself by pain.
Refusal isn’t always successful. There are a lot of days that I feel as though I’m addicted to pain. Unlike my past addiction to barbiturates, I don’t have solutions to the addiction to pain. And I continue to refuse to be defined by pain, or by my inability to walk on an unpaved surface [my ‘z’ axis is difficult to find—too little information from my feet]. It’s becoming harder to not define myself by being ‘uniquely abled’ [I refuse to use the d-word].
I distract myself from the pain by focusing on illustrations or client work; or by being engrossed by a video. Nowadays, I find myself limited by my inability to sit in one spot for very long. This requires more variety in my distractions.
Forty-six years ago, I began a Quest to find a new self by connecting with my Creator. There have been instances, like the Crusade thing above, where I have found a Grace gift of decreased pain. By and large, the pain has continued despite my connection with my Creator, and despite stupid things that church people say, ‘proof-texting’ [take a Bible verse out of context and claim that verse as a promise]. One of the oldest books in Hebrew scripture is the Book of Job—two-thirds of which is declared BS by the Creator. Job is about ‘shit happens.’ The Human Propensity to Fuck things Up continues throughout history. I learned that I can trust my Creator to enable me to get past the shit. Sometimes it means going right through the shit; but it isn’t permanent. While I am sometimes surprised by the events of my life, I know that my Creator is never surprised; I know that the shit doesn’t have to define me. It won’t be there when I die; and death is a doorway into a much larger life. That is a promise we are given.
There are people, some of whom are friends of mine, who talk about ‘the Victorious Christian Life’. It isn’t my life. Unless Persistence is the equivalent of victorious. I didn’t get into this gig expecting Victorious. I got in because I was lost; I had no clue how to live a life. One of the deficiencies of not talking with my parents—but I did not want their life. My wife and I have inherited all of their houses, consecutively; but I did not want their life. I didn’t see meaning in their lives; like Alonso Quihana, I sought a life that I read about in books. I wanted to follow a Quest. I wanted higher goals; I wanted something heroic; I wanted to stop being afraid of people; and to be willing to take risks.
In a post from a few weeks ago, I talked about Benjamin Franklin’s Quest to become a different person. I invested five years of my life learning how to become a different person. The reason I took on that task didn’t have the ending I’d expected; but the learning was immensely valuable.
Enough of that.
A thought, via Functional MRI
- Illustration Tip #13: Repetitive Stress Injury
It’s a thing. IT IS POSSIBLE TO DAMAGE ONESELF BY ‘MOUSING’. I learned this a couple of years ago. I was attempting to help an author/illustrator to digitally publish a children’s book on Amazon by what used to be called CreateSpace—Print on Demand. There was an upcoming presentation, for which a stack of books was desired.
At the beginning of the project, I ordered one of my books for myself, so that I would know the turnaround time between the order and the delivery. That time frame because the calendar for progress on the book. The problem was that the author/illustrator was a perfectionist and kept changing the illustrations. There are rules and guidelines for printing in a book that aren’t applicable to printing a single page. Every time the illustration changed, I needed to tweak the illustration. For the last week or three I was probably working on the book continually, 6 hours a day; clicking my mouse button hundreds of times per day. Before we hit the ‘finish line’ I was using all sorts of methods to stop the burning pain in my neck. My trapezius muscle, which connects to the muscles of the neck and scalp was contracting on my right side. The back of my neck, on the right side only, had developed folds of skin because the underlying muscles were contracting. There were pains in m arm and hand as well [despite the Neuropathy].
I finally decided to try acupuncture. I went to one of the local schools’ clinics. On the first visit, needles in my feet made 90% of the pain go away. The next three visits, with different practitioners, had no discernable impact. I forced myself to avoid the computer for 2-3 weeks. It got better. It changed. The grooves in my neck flattened out again.
I still have repetitive stress issues; I found a CBD lotion that I use every night, and as needed during the day. An hour from now, the alarm on my phone will go off, reminding me that I need to stop working before 2a.
Mariana John Everitt Millais
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Tags: Christianity, depression, faith, freelance illustration, heroes, hope, material poverty, mental-health, Nerve Pain, Neuropathy, persistence, personal excellence, Polyneuropathy, self-employment, surviving
Chronicles in Ordinary Time 