Letting Go of the Endless Pain

Notes from the edge of the abyss

What does it all mean?

How do I pay the rent and groceries?

Who needs my help right now?

What’s the right thing to do?

Are my loved ones ok?

What could I do to protect them?

How can I cheer everyone up?

What if it all goes wrong?

How can I understand what’s happening?

The edge of the abyss is an underrated place, but don’t stay too long.

Hello, my name is Cris Beasley, and my life got exceptionally odd since January. It got so odd in fact that I stopped having a center point of reference from which to relate to you. I could not write for a time.

Lightseer’s Tarot

I sense this is good and that better things will emerge after either I back away from this abyss or am swallowed by it. I seem to have made a career of landing these fool’s leaps.

Perhaps you learn from watching me struggle. Perhaps that’s what this life is for – learning. It certainly isn’t effortless, even if I succeed in making it look so. The Italians have a word for this – spretzzatura.

Observer

Sprezzatura ([sprettsaˈtuːra]) is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".

– Wikipedia

I didn’t feel any spretz on Valentine’s Day when I went to an open mic about love – nope not one ounce of it. Though I dug down into my pockets and checked, I had nothing to say.

I snuck out the back door before the show was over feeling like an alien. That’s not an unusual experience for me. I’m just now starting to understand not only why, but what to do about it.

In these last weeks, I’ve realized some shocking things about myself. I have ADD, childhood PTSD, and object blindness. I say this because I’m coming out of a lifetime of denial.

Needless to say, I wasn’t doing anything to accommodate myself. I didn’t know how. What’s worse than not knowing how to help yourself is not knowing that you need it. I am the fish who doesn’t know that the floor is made of lava and she soon will be teriyaki soup if she doesn’t get her shit together.

Old people and masters and old masters always say that the older we get, the more we realize we don’t know. I wish they had told me that learning new things means your old self dies. Until you get more used to it you are lost and sad for what can be a surprisingly long time. I wish I had known that steps forward can seem so backward that you want to go back to doing it like you always did, but you can’t – not really.

I don’t know how to grieve the old me. I don’t know if I should let her go or paddle out in a hurry to try to save her. I stopped being angry at Jesus for not saving me. I haven’t stopped trying to save myself though. I don’t seem to know how.

Perhaps there’s a chamber of your heart you never felt, never knew, never explored.

When you wake up sad for no reason so many days, so many years, so many decades it’s hard to understand how to move any differently than you always have.

People point at that part of you and you have no idea how to get there. You’re in a library with a thousand shelves and one of them contains a hidden door – a secret passageway out of this grief.

Will I ever find it? What am I even grieving? Nothing that’s happened to me matches up to the depth of sadness stored in my bones.

I’ve never have found the door before so perhaps it’s better to camp out in the living room with old blankets made into a fort until they make us leave.

I’ve been so jealous of people who are happy that I couldn’t even be around them. I couldn’t be their friend. The taste of their flavor of salt should’ve been delicious but it was blind, incomprehensible rage.

I don’t know anything anymore, and I don’t know how to make my art.

These are the wounded wailings of the pain that has no bottom. This is the wallowing pain. I’ve gone all the way down, swam down and down and down and down. I took out my pickaxe and psychedelic dynamite and dug down into bedrock. Always there was more and more pain, but I never found answers to my endless questions.

What does it all mean?

How do I pay the rent and groceries?

Who needs my help right now?

I haven’t known how to trust. I haven’t known how to feel deeply safe, like, REALLY safe inside my own body. I have not known myself, not really.

maunder (v.)

"to wander about aimlessly," 1746, earlier "to mumble, grumble" (1620s), both senses perhaps (with a notion of "to speak with a beggar's whine or grumble") from frequentative of maund "to beg" (1560s), which is possibly from French mendier "to beg," from Latin mendicare "to beg, ask alms" (see mendicant).

[…]suggests futility rather than digression… & failure to reach an end rather than loitering on the way to it."

– Etymology Online

I thought there was a diamond inside the pain, and there is – sometimes. I’ve seen it happen in front of my eyes and in my own life. The pain turns to joy and wonder.

This is the true alchemy of the soul. A deep whisper of knowing arises. This is grace. I’ve experienced it enough times in my life and others to trust it is real.

The nagging questions continue “I haven’t experienced ___________ …” What? What is it I haven’t experienced?

The beginning of wisdom is this blankness. I know a tiny bit more about what it is not.

There is no cheese down this hole I spent three years digging into.

What’s the right thing to do?

Are my loved ones ok?

What could I do to protect them?

I wanted the pain to mean something it didn’t mean and would never mean. I wanted the pain to be my life vest when what I actually needed was a whole boat with galley kitchen and staff.

I’m done diving down into the blankness and bleak nothing where there is no nutrition. I’m heading back into the light. I don’t care anymore that my hands are empty and my mermaid dress is torn. I am body of flesh and blood, and this is enough.

How can I cheer everyone up?

What if it all goes wrong?

How can I understand what’s happening?

I am letting go of this wallowing pain. I wanted the pain to buy me redemption, but it was counterfeit currency.

I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.

– Hoʻoponopono

I am letting go of this maundering pain. I am no beggar.

What would you like me to write about next? Let me know in the comments. Topic suggestions welcome as are questions you’d like me to answer.

• What it was like to forgive Jesus

• What you actually can do to heal ADD

• What to do when you’re drowning in grief and sadness and no one around you understands what you’re going through