The Pained Voice

In 'Blogging the pain,' Höttges (2009) writes,

Grief writing is a strategy that can help the mourner to overcome both the breakdown of the self and the sense of alienation caused by the death of a relational anchor. This healing potential of grief writing is connected to the restoration of language. Pain, as Elaine Scarry writes in her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, is not only “world-destroying”, it also shatters language: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language." Indeed, “[p]hysical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned”. These observations also apply to intense and acute psychological pain—grief—which also resists language and articulates itself in cries, screams, and sobs instead. Attempts to “invent linguistics structures that will reach and accommodate this area of experience normally so inaccessible to language," then, can only be made retroactively, once the wave of pain has subsided enough to allow access to language once more. If the attempt to describe the pain of grief, whether orally or in writing, is made, however, it can “reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification”. Writing, thus, can restore language and reverse the unsharability of pain.

My blogging has been limited this past year. I have shared less of myself than I once did.

Pain and discomfort shattered my language and my voice. It robbed me of time and left me in the confines of a never ending present

In October, I had one of two surgeries that I underwent in winter of 2009. The day after I returned home from this surgery, I received an email from a woman who was an ex-girlfriend of my then recently-ex-boyfriend. Apparently, she had been reading my blog since she discovered me via his Facebook account. She told me that he began discussing our relationship problems with her when I indicated a desire to end things. She had some sort of falling out with him and for god-knows-what-reason felt that she should contact me to reassure me he is a loser. Worse, she forwarded some correspondence he sent to her lamenting the difficulty he was having in stopping himself from reading my blog.

Though it's embarrassing to reveal this, I desperately need to liberate myself of this little secret. I am not some sad, broken woman who feels betrayed. I am just so embarrassed and ashamed that I dated someone so fucking weird and creepy. Seriously, should I have not have honed my intuition by now? I am a grown woman not some freak made for the Jerry Springer show!

Anyway, for some time, I really felt robbed of this space.

It is entirely possible that one or both continue to read my blog. I don't care.

I stopped caring quite a while ago, but by February I faced a new set of hardships. I had a significant setback in my recovery. Around this same time, my father became very ill.

My father is doing much better which has been a huge relief - I literally feel like a weight was lifted off my chest.

I am slowly, but surely getting stronger and enjoying longer periods of good health. I am wrapping up my graduate work which was interrupted terribly last year - being torn from the work I loved was a terrible loss which I grieved intensely.

Everything is returning to normal again. My words are forming more easily.

It is difficult to know how much I will be blogging given that I will be incredibly busy as complete the last leg of this academic marathon.

For certain, any absence will not owe to a loss of voice. I am able to speak through the pain that lingers.

In a week it will be the one year anniversary of the first surgery. I have endured.

I wish I could claim to be kicking ass in a bigger way. I will be soon...Watch out!

Comments

[Sage]

When my partner lived with me, and we were breaking up, I made a new blog to discuss our issues - private from him, but public to others. But he checked the history to find it. I had to delete any history of anything I did to keep him from checking up on my conversations on Facebook, blogging or elsewhere. What an invasion of privacy! Eventually I just got my own computer with a password! That felt great!

But I don't think it's our responsibility to hone our creep-radar to perfection. I think we can only reasonably hope that people we meet and find attractive are not too weird, and go from there. I accept no responsibility for hooking up with a jerk. It just is what it is. It's not necessarily something to learn from, just something to have survived. And there's often a good story in there somewhere!