Pain Is Relative

For 30 plus years my dad worked a hard labor job. The type of work that takes a toll on your body, back breaking work—literally. For the longest time my dad has had back problems. When my brother and I were kids, we used to walk up and down my dad’s back. For us, it was fun. For my dad, it was brief relief. Over the years, his pain has become increasingly worse to the point where he has to take multiple medications to ease the pain . If he sits for too long, he has to get up otherwise his back starts to ache. He does multiple stretches to keep his back from locking up. I’ve known it’s something he’s always dealt with but I guess I didn’t know how bad it was.

My dad had back surgery today. He was supposed to have it last year but when the Pandemic hit, it was put on hold. When he got x-rays done, we all could see the damage done over the decades. It didn’t look pretty. My dad is not one to complain and it appears he has been keeping his pain under wraps or at the very least, downplaying it to the rest of us. When my step-mom called me to update me on my dad’s condition, she told me there were breaks in two places. On one hand, I was relieved he came out of the surgery okay and the doctor said everything went well, but on the other hand I was horrified just how bad his back really was.

It didn’t really hit me until I thought about how he’s been doing car repairs, home improvements, simple errands and other activities of the like with a back in such distress. He only mentioned how he was relieved to get a date for surgery but didn’t really go into detail about how bad his pain really was. If he was only recently starting to slightly complain about how much the pain was bothering him, I can’t imagine what the past few years have been like for him to live with this.

Only when I started thinking about this is when I realized I hide a lot of my pain, too, and I am sure that is a trait that was passed down from my father. My propensity to keep things inside and never fully express myself in the truest form is one I downplay. Well, I guess I express it here where I know no one comes and reads my stuff but otherwise it is kept to myself. I’ve always seen it as weak. I still do. Months of therapy hasn’t changed my outlook on my emotions. I still get weird when I do anything that doesn’t project normalcy.

When I was still in therapy, I would frequently mention my need to feel normal because I don’t feel normal. I feel like damaged goods and I always wonder who would want to love someone this damaged? I’m fucked up beyond repair, how could anyone find that remotely attractive? How could anyone fall in love with something that can’t be fixed? Who wants to deal with someone who has bouts of depression? Night terrors? A general distrust of people? Mommy issues—a dead mother out of all things? That’s not a lovable person, that’s someone who is repulsive—a repellant. No man could ever desire that. No one should have to deal with it. It’s my cross to bear, I’d feel guilty to inflict that on another person.

So I keep it to myself so at the very least I can fake normalcy until the person finds out all the ugly things about me and decides to leave. I feel like I have to do this, otherwise I’ll never feel any ounce of joy in my life.