What Is My Problem?

By Miranda Popkey

I suppose there must be people who go whole days, whole weeks even, without muttering piece of shit, you’re a piece of shit to themselves; I am, alas, not one of them. For a long time — until, oh, a couple of weeks ago — I thought it served as a helpful reminder; truly I did. I would catch myself idly chanting the words under my breath, reflexively chide myself, remember something awful I’d done, and begin repeating the phrase deliberately. Remember you’re a piece of shit. Remember you’re a piece of shit. If only I could remember this always, I thought, I’d never again be selfish or snappish or cruel.

Remember this always and remember also its corollary: my instincts, my desires, my whole self — all pointed in an evil direction. Whatever I wanted to do at any given moment: the key was to remember you’re a piece of shit and do the opposite. The words were guardrails on an icy road and it was in my nature to speed. Only very recently did I realize this was — oh you’re going to laugh — a cry for help.

Or, not help — there was no hope of help. It was a little yelp of pain. A mantra, a prayer, a ritual; a way of getting from one moment to the next. The thing is: I find the experience of living painful. I don’t know why. Bad brain, maybe. Bad personality, likely. And it’s easy, when in pain and for no obvious reason save continued existence, logical even, to assume the pain is punishment and set off on the scent of your latest mistake.

Because riddle me this: if I’ve done nothing wrong, then why do I feel so bad? It doesn’t help that, being human, I have literally always recently done at least one thing, possibly several things, fully ass-backwards.

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How dramatic it all sounds! The pain of being alive, I mean puh-lease. (The author Asali Solomon called something like this “the shame of being alive,” in her first novel, Disgruntled.) Then again we accept the existence of chronic physical pain. Why not chronic mental pain? (And yes I know about anxiety and depression, I’ve been diagnosed with both. Only those are feelings and of necessarily lower ontological* status than, for example, the pain of an ankle sprain.)

Anyway, once I pulled that thread the whole shag carpet unraveled. So being alone with myself isn’t awful because I’m awful, being alone with myself is awful because there’s nothing to distract from the pain. So wanting to be drunk all the time (whoops) is about wanting to be numb. So working is about distraction. So running is about replacing pain I don’t understand with the pain I do. So hangovers are a pain I understand and also the pain I think I deserve for having the gall to numb the pain that must be punishment for something I’ve done if only I could remember what it was. I wasn’t even raised Catholic, not really. The mind wants a narrative, I suppose, at least this one does.

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On the phone with my friend L, also a writer, also a runner, I tried to explain my revelation: how it hurts all the time; how I want it to stop; how very drunk I’m interested in getting in pursuit of said stopping. “But,” she said, “don’t you want to feel things?” I knew what she meant. Feeling a thing, and then being able to describe in words how it felt: sometimes when I’m able to do this to my own exacting specifications I want slightly less to hit the eject button on my, you know, life.

But also no; no I don’t want to feel things. I’ve been feeling everything all the time for thirty-four years and sometimes, more than I relish admitting, I would like, please, to be done. It’s not depression (cement being poured on my chest; five feet underwater and no way to swim up). It’s not anxiety (nausea, rapid heartbeat, catastrophic sweating). It’s not actual pain; that is, I can’t tell you where it hurts. It’s being alive and being alive and still being alive and how that seems, not all of the time but enough of the time, simply too much to bear. Like, I’m supposed to sit here, wearing this paper-thin skin-suit, and just wait for my brain to assault me with some goddam sensation?

Consciousness was a mistake, is something I’ve tweeted, repeatedly, to two, perhaps three collective likes. And this is what I meant: knowing I’m alive, and that anything could happen, is in fact probably happening to someone else right this very second (why not me, shouldn’t it be me, I’m no better, in fact probably I’m worse) — that was a mistake. I’m a big ol’ crybaby and I would like to return my higher brain functions to the higher brain function factory, thank you. A signal when I’m hungry and another when I’m cold. That should suffice.

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It’s funny, though, thinking of this mental glitch like an injury. When I first started running more consistently, three or four years ago, I developed a pain in my right quad, right above the knee. I did a little googling and a little strength training and also I changed my gait. I used to run heel-first; now I’m a front-striker. 

So I guess I’m changing my gait. Not giving up anything, not definitively, not yet; just trying, more often, to sit with it. It being the pain. Trying distractions with fewer side effects. (What’s the equivalent of ibuprofen for a sore brain?) Which boils down I suppose to trying to be less afraid. God, it hurts to be alive just now, doesn’t it! Or maybe it always did or maybe for some it never would or quite possibly my tolerance is lower than is strictly recommended.

I’m most afraid before I go to sleep. I want so badly to be unconscious and also I’m so scared to die. I don’t know why they actually swaddle babies but it sometimes seems like being swaddled, or straight-jacketed might help. I dream of being sealed into a mold made exactly to my body’s dimensions so that every inch of my skin can feel something other than itself. Until this technology is developed, I’m going to grit my teeth and breathe through my nose and try to be in, try to move through, try to hold very still, and simply bear the goddamn moment. Possibly also I will keep a podcast on as I try to fall asleep. Sometimes that helps.

*No, I don’t know if I’m using the word “ontological” correctly.

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Miranda Popkey lives in Massachusetts. You can find more of her work right here.

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