Silence

I went to Urgent Care today to get a dressing changed and noticed something while I was there.

The exam room I was waiting in had a door which connected it to another exam room. As I sat down to wait for the doctor, I heard through the door exclamations of, "Oh! Ow. Owowow! That HURTS! OWWW!" It wasn't dramatic, just  another patient on the other side of the door, getting themselves through the pain. It made me think, because I don't do that.

When I'm experiencing pain, I get quiet. I tamp it down before I realize I'm doing so. It's reflexive. Compulsive, maybe.

Hearing someone who had no problem sharing how hard it was to feel the way they did made me remember back to a time with my former roommates where we sat around and took a pop psychology sort of story-quiz together. We shared our answers to all the different scenarios in the story, then laughed together as the meaning of our answers were decoded.

One of the questions was what you would do if you were on a horse in the desert near a ravine and saw a storm coming along the horizon. I said I would go into the ravine and find the best shelter I could to hunker down while waiting for the storm to pass over me. The storm represented problems, troubles, trials, and difficulty. And there I was, hunkering down. This is the definition of my silence, my repressed cries of pain. I'm just waiting it out-- at least I've learned it will pass.

But I think there could be more. The feeling I get when I think about hunkering down... It's the same feeling I had yesterday when I went into Urgent Care to get the cyst on my tailbone drained. It's the quick sucking in of a painful breath and the water flooding my eyes but not spilling over as my body quietly shakes with the shock of the sensation; the painfully clenched fists and tremoring muscles and the breathing breathing breathing to make it through one more moment; focus in, focus in, focus in. Closed flickering eyes tightened mouth and breathe breathe breathe deep until it stops.

There's something more than nerves that hurt in that.