Years, Days, Hours

''You have your wonderful memories," people said later as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

-Joan Didion, Blue Nights

I've spent hundreds of days and hours, spent years trying to figure out where I should put this pain that I have in me, what to do with it, trying to make sense of something senseless. Pain doesn’t come with instructions, and the effort to figure out where it belongs, how to live with it, or even how to escape it feels like a second punishment. I've convinced myself that in the end, somewhere someday in the future, all of these will be worth it, I will transform my suffering into something meaningful and now I am learning that I won't, it won't. I have been fed this narrative that everything you go through in life is a path to growth or some kind of reward. But when you become aware that that transformation will not come, it feels like being robbed twice — once by the pain itself and again by the false promise of meaning. All for nothing. No, maybe it didn't mean anything. You will not get a prize for ''Miserable Loser of the Decade'' or a pat on the back. There is not a redemption arc. There is just silence and acceptance.

And there is this feeling of betrayal. Betrayed that now I cannot go back and change things, also feeling furious that I am, still, suffering. I am let down by the promise that pain can be a teacher blah blah or that forgiveness will liberate you. The silent reality doesn’t offer lessons, closure, or redemption. It just is. I can't grow up, I can't forget, I can't forgive, it's like I'm stuck in a moment that will not let me go. And the furious endurance of suffering, the inability to undo or make sense of it, feels profoundly unfair.

Is it even sensible to mourn that? To feel anger, sadness, and exhaustion at the effort poured into searching, waiting for something that doesn’t seem to exist? How can I explain this anger? It’s not just about the anger itself either, but about the isolation it creates. How can I still resent the sense of being left behind, of missing out on a life that seemed to come so easily to others? It’s so cruel to feel like the chance to live certain experiences has passed you by, and even crueler to feel that others might not understand or have the patience for you to catch up. But even I don't have patience for myself.

Rayne Fisher-Quaan wrote, ''When we are hurt, we not only hold the burden of proof to the outside world — we hold it, quietly and intimately, against ourselves.'' and I've been thinking about that a lot recently. It captures the dual weight of pain: the need to justify or explain our hurt to others and the internal struggle to validate our own emotions. The inner conflict of questioning if our pain is "justified" or "worthy" is isolating, it's as if we become both the defendant and the judge in the courtroom of our own minds. Our minds are both a home and a battleground.

''It wasn’t that she disliked herself, though some have accused her of this. It was more that the world was not adapted to her and so she spent her life looking for a place she could bear to live ... Her most constant feeling was of rejection by the world. Not just individual people but the whole world—the great, hulking force of it.'' by Rose Lyddon