pain: i do not like it
I feel embarrassed complaining about this while various friends are having real health crises, but not embarrassed enough not to complain about it. My shoulder is fucked up and it hurts a lot. Claire snuck into our bed on Monday night – I know, I know – and I ended up falling asleep with my left arm hoiked up over my head. Now every time I breathe it feels like getting stabbed.
Respect to my perky crip girl homies who put up with this sorta shit day in day out. Pain isn’t character-improving. It just sucks. I have been impossible to live with all week.
I expected to catch flack for editing those bitter ex-church posts last week, but it came from a direction I wasn’t expecting. That hurt, too. I had three reasons for changing the entries. One is that I got off my ass and called David to get Ann’s number, then called Ann and chatted to her for a while. We were best friends as children and I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly twenty years. On the off chance that she Googles me, I didn’t want her to end up face to face with that.
The second reason is that a few days later even I didn’t agree with what I had written. David’s father’s crimes have nothing to do with David’s ministry now, and to drag them into a discussion of what David is doing amounts to an ad hominem attack. I still disagree with the position he took on the smoking ceremony, so I left that in. Of course to me there’s no difference between the various invisible superheroes in the sky. I imagine if you still believe that some are real and some are not, it changes your perspective.
The third reason I changed it is also embarrassing. Many abusers are themselves survivors of abuse. I’ve known this for decades, but it took me until Monday night to make the connection that Vic himself may have been a survivor of abuse. So here’s me carrying on this great crusade for years, imagining that I was standing up for the little children, completely overlooking the fact that he was a little child once, and chances are no one ever stood up for him.
That hurts, too. When it hit me I just started crying, in the middle of explaining it all to Salome. That was on Monday night. Maybe God smote me in the shoulder. It’s just the sort of thing He would do.
So there is truth and the central importance of truth and the need to tell it, to tell stories honestly, to not lie, ever, about anything. This is a given. But there is also the need to be kind. The Dalai Lama says “My religion is kindness,” which seems to cover it, pretty much. Or Primum non nocere. And sometimes these two imperatives are hard to reconcile. Is it even possible to tell the truth and be kind? I don’t know. But I know I have to try.
