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Pain and gain
Oct. 18th, 2011 08:03 pmMy fingernails hurt.
I've been digging up an area of my friend M's yard, with the intention of putting in more flower beds and a pathway. I've been using a generic version of the Garden Claw hand tiller thingie (which is frickin' awesome, incidentally), but then I've been pulling out weed roots and rocks using my hands. I rarely use gardening gloves; I can't feel what I'm doing, and it drives me crazy. So after a long afternoon of prying up rocks and digging the hard soil out from around them with my bare hands, I've got dirt embedded so far under my middle fingers (there's a juvenile joke there, but I'm gonna resist) that it's in the quick.
It's a good hurt, like when you bike 30 miles in a day or hike for four hours and you've gotten home and sat down and you go to stand up and "Oh, wow, am I sore!" I feel a sense of accomplishment as I type and my fingers occasionally hit the keys in a way that hurts. I don't know how common that feeling of pride is, but it doesn't seem abnormal.
I used to cut my arms. I started not long after I got to college, and I did it for a decade before I stopped about 11 years ago. I recently started a Facebook page for my pen name, which at least for now revolves around the half-finished memoir I wrote not long after I stopped cutting myself. In an exchange with one of the women who's "liked" the page, I remembered that I had almost never cut myself while the previous cuts were still healing. The original cut would soothe me when I did it, and the sting I felt later when it brushed against something, or just seeing the mark, gave me enough of that calm feeling that I didn't need a fresh cut. If cutting is an addiction, the leftover pain was methadone, I guess.
My throbbing fingers don't soothe me in the same way, but there's just enough of a similarity that I feel... I don't know. Not ashamed, exactly, but very aware, and with a desire to look away from the thought. And it reminds me of something else.
Long before college and cutting, in seventh grade, I decided to clear all the briars in my neighbor's horse pasture. I used a short-handled sickle, swinging it over and over at the base of a tangle, then pulling free what strands I could so that I could get farther into the mass. It was fall, but it was Kentucky and it was warm work, so most of the time I wore short sleeves. My arms were crisscrossed with briar scratches, and when my social studies teacher commented on them, I told him with pride where they had come from.
It was my brother who showed me how to use the sickle, how to hold it with the blade turned out away from you, swinging out, not in toward my body. When I wielded it, I felt strong, not like a little crybaby girl, but like a young man, one who could take care of himself. I felt like I was my brother.
It was my brother who had molested me, but that was ages ago, three years or more. It was three more years before I stumbled across a teen novel about sexual abuse, which was when I discovered that when people said "per-vert," they were talking about people like my brother. For now, I just ached to be like him, to be him: strong, independent, and a little dangerous.
I've been digging up an area of my friend M's yard, with the intention of putting in more flower beds and a pathway. I've been using a generic version of the Garden Claw hand tiller thingie (which is frickin' awesome, incidentally), but then I've been pulling out weed roots and rocks using my hands. I rarely use gardening gloves; I can't feel what I'm doing, and it drives me crazy. So after a long afternoon of prying up rocks and digging the hard soil out from around them with my bare hands, I've got dirt embedded so far under my middle fingers (there's a juvenile joke there, but I'm gonna resist) that it's in the quick.
It's a good hurt, like when you bike 30 miles in a day or hike for four hours and you've gotten home and sat down and you go to stand up and "Oh, wow, am I sore!" I feel a sense of accomplishment as I type and my fingers occasionally hit the keys in a way that hurts. I don't know how common that feeling of pride is, but it doesn't seem abnormal.
I used to cut my arms. I started not long after I got to college, and I did it for a decade before I stopped about 11 years ago. I recently started a Facebook page for my pen name, which at least for now revolves around the half-finished memoir I wrote not long after I stopped cutting myself. In an exchange with one of the women who's "liked" the page, I remembered that I had almost never cut myself while the previous cuts were still healing. The original cut would soothe me when I did it, and the sting I felt later when it brushed against something, or just seeing the mark, gave me enough of that calm feeling that I didn't need a fresh cut. If cutting is an addiction, the leftover pain was methadone, I guess.
My throbbing fingers don't soothe me in the same way, but there's just enough of a similarity that I feel... I don't know. Not ashamed, exactly, but very aware, and with a desire to look away from the thought. And it reminds me of something else.
Long before college and cutting, in seventh grade, I decided to clear all the briars in my neighbor's horse pasture. I used a short-handled sickle, swinging it over and over at the base of a tangle, then pulling free what strands I could so that I could get farther into the mass. It was fall, but it was Kentucky and it was warm work, so most of the time I wore short sleeves. My arms were crisscrossed with briar scratches, and when my social studies teacher commented on them, I told him with pride where they had come from.
It was my brother who showed me how to use the sickle, how to hold it with the blade turned out away from you, swinging out, not in toward my body. When I wielded it, I felt strong, not like a little crybaby girl, but like a young man, one who could take care of himself. I felt like I was my brother.
It was my brother who had molested me, but that was ages ago, three years or more. It was three more years before I stumbled across a teen novel about sexual abuse, which was when I discovered that when people said "per-vert," they were talking about people like my brother. For now, I just ached to be like him, to be him: strong, independent, and a little dangerous.