Healing Hurts

This is supposed to be healing.

Healing hurts.

Healing is endless.

Healing feels nothing like soothing and remedies and balms.

Healing feels everything like surgical interventions and horrible-tasting medicine and hours and hours of lying inert in bandages not knowing if I will one day feel better.

If the procedure is even successful.

Healing is letting those surgeons cut and rip open your innards and needing to trust that they know what they’re doing.

And then it’s having them disappear and not come back until much, much later to evaluate how the interventions are going.

Leaving you in the dark with your demons.

And the pain.

Leaving you in a twilight zone, that haze where reality is blurred and you’re just passing by the time trying to make it through.

But the thing is that there are no anesthetics for this procedure. Only self-provided numbing that backfires in its own way. And the healers, they try to take AWAY the numbing.

They want it to hurt.

And I wonder if they have a clue how much it hurts.

They claim they know. They say they’re doing it for a greater good.

But can they really know?

Do they have an idea how on top of the incision pains there’s still the ache of loneliness in a ward where no one steps foot to even visit and check how you’re doing?

And I bump along this cycle of feeling like they do understand — at least a tiny bit, but then feeling like they really, really don’t begin to fathom how much this hurts.

But I’m already too weak and exhausted to even wonder.

So I stop kicking and fighting and questioning and analyzing this process.

Instead, I resign myself to this fate of being led down a thorny path that doesn’t seem to lead to anywhere.

That goes round and round and round, the trails looping around each other in a way that feels I keep traversing the same terrain.

And yet, they say it’s a mountain, and that each loop is on a bit higher terrain, closer to the top.

But I don’t even know why I’m trying to get to the top. I don’t think the air quality is even good there.