Personal Pain

Sometimes when I am courting excess drug use and party atmosphere, I fall into a kind of "spiritual exhaustion". It feels like a wet, uncertain sliver opening up in my breastbone. I find it difficult to feel confident - a slippery nervousness that gets jostled with every breath. Usually it will close after a good amount of sleep, or after a relatively sober time passes. It is undesirable state, of course.

But recently I had opportunity to more deeply explore this feeling. The circumstances and influences were manifold: a bit of drug use, but also premenstrual tendency toward weepiness, a ripening moon, and mounting sleep deprivation. All this mired in the middle of 24 hour Twin Peaks marathon, and exacerbated by intense interpersonal social scenario.

Possibly the most important factor here is the Marathon. Twin Peaks is a serious piece for me, and I developed this event - open to the public, put on at a community center - primarily because I had a desire to ... realize the series as a complete work in time, a whole. What would that be like? Though I've viewed it a dozen times, I have never dedicated that full chunk of time ... it was an experiment of sorts. ... I would do it differently in the future. The series is simply too uneven to be consistently compelling, with the extreme dramatic climax happening midway and losing steam afterward. But that climax ... with all its horrific, overwrought, poignant sorrows ...

With the progression of episodes happening in succession, it was easy to let the terror and despair compound upon themselves. And I was feeling emotionally unstable. AND there was the aforementioned "intense interpersonal social scenario". I can't be too specific there - suffice it to say that I was perceiving, experiencing, what (in my paranoid state) amounted to a complex but thorough rejection - personal insult - through a group of people whom I had found myself growing complicatedly closer to over the last month. All my delusions of blossoming friendship ran up against this cold wall - I felt so disrespected - and yet - what was my behavior? I could not resist - I got closer. I sat myself in a chair right outside the knot of this group of people. The feelings of betrayal that their chatter inspired in me blossomed ... the sliver of nervous exhaustion grew! To a full, round disk of raw, wounded insult. I would realize this intense sensation in moments, blinking on with each burst of their laughter, and I was fascinated by how huge it was in my body. It had grown from a sliver to command my entire chest, from shoulder to shoulder.

Finally, I took control of this feeling of emotional wounding, and sustained focus on it. When it rose like a tide, I seized it and held it in place. ... My entire chest felt ripped, trembling, agonized from this absolutely pure Rejection, and somehow, I began to savor this feeling. It made so much sense - the deeply horrifying murders on the screen, the portrayal of extreme and devastating loss, and my own sudden ability to really, truly experience Intense Personal Pain, to hold the horror in a ravaged body, to feel the depths of something so terrible. This concept of garmonbozia - pain and suffering - established in the TP universe guided me, no doubt. Having achieved some kind of revelation in my being, suddenly the offending social circumstances - still quite present - sunk into the background. It was all no less insulting, but being trapped in this vibration of something so Wrong, so Awful, brought a detaching transcendence, a grievous personal suffering crystallized in a perfect, unstable, degraded physical sensation.

I have always felt quite tenderly towards grief, and been comfortable in the presence of depressed individuals - I mean I don't try to create depression or grief. These things naturally occur and I guess I "enjoy" the subdued feeling they create in others, and my inclination is to help find some measure of relief for that person. I suppose it amounts to something more than hanging out, when depression is present - there is a goal, there is emotional work, there is the opportunity to change and shape circumstances and response. But this was my first experience of "crystalline, transcendent grief". I don't know why this should be a positive experience for me, but I can return to the memory with fondness. The recently cultivated feeling still echoes in my chest, and I am proud of it. Why would this be?