When Pain hurts

It seems like I've been dealing with a lot of pain lately, since I'm writing about it for the second blog-entry in a row. But no, it is not that I've entered a painful phase… At least, I think and I hope that this isn't the case. Last time, I was talking about pains of the past. But those pains hurt less, now that I came to realize that pains of the past, still, are only pains of the past. What hurts more, I feel, is direct, fresh pain. Especially in those times when, to you, pain seems like some far away aspect of the past. I can't sleep now... I am tired. But my stomach is making noises, because whatever I take in just won't stay in. And then, my head is making noises. I don't want to sleep. Since, for months, I haven't been in pain, or so afraid of it, as I am now. And here I'm talking emotional pain -- which physically hurts. My arms, especially my left one, always hurt when I'm really upset, which I started getting years ago, when I had my first heartbreak. When I felt it again now, I had to get out of bed. For I don't want to go to bed unhappy. I developed a huge fear of unhappiness, or of happiness, respectively,-- like when my fear of heights increases, the higher I get, and the more slippery the path upwards becomes.

The Box of Pain

I was searching for a poem I once wrote, so I opened the box. The box with scribbled papers, that were so familiar and yet so distant. I have noticed that I had been suffering from a writer's block and now I came to realize that the block was due to my developed over-critical attitude. As a philology student you get to read a lot. But you don't read with a 'normal' reader's attitude, but from a more scientific, analytical and less humanistic perspective. There is this attempt at being scientific, at being objective, while quite aware that this is not possible, nor even right. Your evaluation differs a lot.
At some point I felt that this is not just, that this way you are reducing literature, that your subjective feelings and impressions should be the criteria, that you should give the words a chance to reach you and warm you up, that you should let them go over you, and not vice versa. I got tired of stone-cold sober reading, and since I didn't differentiate, I was bored of reading altogether. On the other hand, when you are used to being the one who is louring over the microscope doing the decomposing and re-composing, you don't feel like going under it yourself…Because you know how things work. It is just like doctors are the worst patients, and they hate it the most, since they just know too much. So I was stuck between the writer and the critic and I personified the conflict between them.
I took a distance; and slowly, my ink is starting to flow again. So yesterday I opened the box and went through it. There was a lot of stuff I didn't know I had written. There was a lot of stuff I had written. And I noticed that not all the things I wrote I would consider good writing, that back then, I didn't care that much about being a 'good' writer. I just wanted to express myself. That is what made it easy for me to write a lot. But I also noticed that most of the things I wrote were sad or depressing, or are so in retrospect. I couldn't continue reading everything; I was frightened by the pain, which I forgot could be so painful. Especially the letters I wrote and never sent…God. I was overwhelmed. Some writings I actually hated. Those boxes...They're not good!!