The Science of Pain.

How do people get out of bed when they don’t feel up to it? When nursing deep emotional pain? How do you take off your covers and put your feet in your slippers when you can feel your heart being squeezed, your chest tightening up, a ball in your throat, a pit in your stomach, a tear at the corner of your eye? How?

How do you power through feeling like everything is crashing down? How do you speak without sobs getting caught in your throat? How does everything you see not remind you of the pain? How do you not tighten your hands in a fist until your fingernails dig through the skin of your palm? Until your knuckles hurt? Until you see blood? Until you feel enough pain to drown out the one in your chest? How?

How do you eat normally? How are you not eating too much or too little? Enough food to suppress the pain or none at all because it won’t go through? Tell me, how do you take a bath? How do you not end up sprawled on the bathroom floor bawling your eyes out under the shower, clutching your chest in hope that the pain would stop? How?

How do you share? How do you talk to someone about the pain in your heart without collapsing into a heap of tears and sobs and choked up words? How do you not grip your blanket harder, squeeze your eyes shut tighter and pray that something changes…that you never have to talk about this? How?

How do you watch movies? How does the picture not turn into a pixelated blur because the tears won’t stop? Again, how does everything not remind you of the pain? Every movie, every picture, every song, every object, every place, every person, every story, every tweet? How?

How do you not blame yourself? How do you not connect the dots and find a way to lead this back to you? Something you did eight years ago? Somewhere you were two months ago? Something you said yesterday…or something you didn’t? How do you not drown yourself in the pain, in the blame? How?

How do you move on? How do you forget? How do you stop hurting? How do you stop blaming yourself? How do you dissolve the tightening in your chest? Fill the pit in your stomach? Dry the tears in your eyes? How do you wake up one day and not feel any of it again?

How do you master the science of pain?

How???