Michael Tichy is an author and psychiatric nurse practitioner from the gaping maw of grey America that is Ohio. Co-author of the award-winning experimental haunting book Voidhaus, hisdebut novel The Winnowing Draw was released in February of thisyear. Previous works include the novella Behind Every Tree, Beneath Every Rock and the collection Wound of the West (Castaigne). His stories have appeared in the anthologies Shredded, Into the Crypts of Rays, and Shiver.
*The following was originally published on Tichy’s blog*
I was 21 when I got my first tattoo. Actually pretty late by the standards of the crowd I came up with but I had a surplus of caution beyond my years from a very young age. A terrible bicycle accident at age 15 left me chronically ill and multiple surgeries failed to provide any lasting improvement. At 21, I found myself in a brief window when I actually felt good. It was shortly after the first reconstructive surgery of my urethra and I had a feeling of hope for the first time in six years. I thought this might finally be it, that I might be ok. I wasn’t, not for about five more years, but hope is a life preserver. The sharks might be circling underneath, but at least you can breathe.
I was reading Crowley at the time and got a caduceus on my forearm with Arabic scrawl of a Lovecraft quote I cribbed from a tabletop RPG book. I don’t remember it hurting. I don’t remember much about it actually other than the allergic reaction I had afterward to neosporin, and how badly it itched and how the bubbly rash on my skin wound up blowing out some of the lines.
I was already deep in a kind of grief at that age, the kind that has so defined your life that it is invisible. A medium that stifles the breath but doesn’t fully suffocate. The kind of fog that induces near sightedness. The kind of undifferentiated grief of a life irrevocably altered in adolescence. It’s the kind of loss only apparent in retrospect, of all the things that I would never experience. The future selves I would never be. Because there was never a sense of security in my body, never a feeling that I would be stable enough to take the kind of chances that young people can and should take. A heavy blanket that hobbles and confines.
During that phase of my life, even for a time after the surgery that finally did work, it was easy to mistake detachment for toughness. Having missed out on so much, the one thing I had to be proud of was my my tolerance for pain. As I collected tattoos, that toughness became a core part of my identity. The inability to feel anything intensely can look like a superpower when it seems like all you’ve known is pain. It was the kind of thing to faux-casually talk about. Being able to sit quietly for eight hours at a time under the needle. Impressive.
A decade or so later, and this had lost its luster. It got to a point when I was getting my entire torso covered in large-scale pieces, that I would do anything in my power to reduce the pain. It was all I could think about once the initial endorphin rush faded. I used topical anesthetics that were new at the time. Pre-loading with ibuprofen, drinking large quantities of coffee -because I read somewhere it reduces inflammation- I would try almost anything.
The thing about numbing yourself is that when the pain finally outlives the numbing agent, or simply overwhelms it, it is much more intense and more difficult to navigate. Maybe you thought you had it licked, so its mere presence elicits a feeling of defeat. Like “I did this so I didn’t have to figure out another way to handle it, and now I’m so beat up and tired I can’t.” Or else its slow and gradual arrival is like an invading army that has been massing on your border, and once the defenses are down, the scale of it is overwhelming.
I’m guessing you can see where I’m going here.
This is not to say that numbing or avoiding never has a place. Only that if it’s your sole strategy, it is ultimately going to fail spectacularly. One way or another. You can be too successful at learning not to feel things, and it can take a hell of a lot of work to find your way back to that part of yourself. Or else you just hit the wall and come completely apart. The only question is when.
I gave up on the topicals and all my methods of pain management because of this failure, because it just didn’t provide any lasting peace. Not how I wanted it to. I was sitting for a particularly long session when I finally realized that numbing actually worsened the experience because pain and its avoidance occupied all my attention. It was a constant awareness and evaluation of what I could feel, the moment by moment irritation inflated by my focus on it. I fought to hold myself still because I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of cutting the session short. But all that tension, muscles tight, breathing shallow, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck the next day. There had to be another way.
I couldn’t backtrack to the bravado of my youth. This was just another bypass, but more than that, it was out of reach by this point. The trauma that gave birth to it was too remote. By now I was ten years or more past the last surgery. The memories of the intensity of pain were like hidden thorns I stepped on from time to time, brief and overwhelming, even panic-inducing. There was no refuge for me there.
No. The only place to go as I saw it was the opposite of everything I had tried before. By then I had been reading a fair amount about Buddhism and had begun an irregular meditation practice, and I thought about attachment and aversion and the pitfalls these were said to represent. Avoidance led to suffering. So what about mindful awareness of sensation? To be completely present to what was happening. The next session, I tried putting the whole of my focus not on some distraction but precisely at the place where the needle met my skin. Not in a fearful, apprehensive way, but in a curious, nonjudgmental way. When sensation overwhelmed, I would back off a little. Retreat. Shift my attention to an adjacent area, keeping it as close to the locus of my pain as possible.
After so much habitual avoidance, this was difficult at first. My mind wanted to drift elsewhere. To detach or disassociate, to find some corner of the mind, some problem to mull over. Anything other than the body. I resisted, fought for once to actually feel, and ultimately there was a measure of peace to be found there. And what I learned in the process was that feeling the thing itself is almost always less agonizing than trying not to. That pain itself -the real moment to moment sensation- is much less intense than my imagined version of it, than what fear trained me to believe it is.
This, for me, is the only pathway through grief.
My best friend died this year. I’ve known him since I was 13 years old. That’s 35 years. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. If you grow up poor, you will lose a lot of people by the time you’re an adult, and then a steady string of losses from then on. I didn’t feel a lot of these. Not really. I spent so much of my life in that place of fear and avoidance. I wouldn’t let it in. Denial, detachment. I hurt at the loss, but not in the deeply wounding way I’ve come to know now. I’ve lost three people close to me in the last three years. The last was my best friend. It hurt in a way that is impossible to articulate. The people we love become a part of us and the loss is like something being cut away, and I wonder how many amputations one person can take before there isn’t enough left of me to be whole. To be a person anymore.
In my twenties, I drank through the pain. And I’m not saying I’m not doing any of that these days, but I recognize it for what it is: tapping the brakes. In my thirties, I rationalized. Tried to find some measure of peace in denying the validity of emotion. And I do some of that too. The rational can provide the feeling of some stable ground when everything is falling away. In my forties, I can finally sit with the pain, put myself as close to the center of it as possible and live there. It’s not a monster. My grief can feel too big to reckon. But it is not the immeasurable or insurmountable thing of my imagination. Not a thing I can never learn to live with because the piece of me I needed to live with it has been cut away. It is not a boundless, gnawing void -though it can pass for one at times. It is a wound. And, great wound that it is, I can find my way to the edges of it and take account of its dimensions. I can sit with it and feel the bitter wind that rolls off from it. I can learn something about my life and my capacity to love and be loved.
And no, nothing has to happen for a reason. These horrors we go through are not the universe trying to teach us. But I can still extract meaning from pain. Because meaning is not a thing outside us and it’s not a thing we create from nothing. Meaning is cocreated by ourselves and the world. By our experiences and our efforts. By the people we are and the people we could be.
What all of this boils down to is discomfort and how we choose to meet it. A common misunderstanding of the first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. The real translation is that life is characterized by dukkha, and dukkha is just the essential unsatisfactoriness of all things. Where the suffering comes in is when we evaluate that as unfair and take it personally. I didn’t ask for this life and I was not prepared for the disappointments in it as a child. Growing up evangelical, I was incubated in a pardox of a loving God who is also jealous and punishing. It is reasonable to be angry about all of that. We can all be angry, aggrieved, sad. These are valid feelings, but ultimately we have to live our lives. Whoever or whatever may be responsible for how we got here, no one else is going to suffer with us or for us. There is no cosmic arbiter to settle the old scores and even if there were, that would do nothing to improve our current circ*mstances.
I’m almost fifty years old. I’ve been studying psychology and Buddhism most of my adult life and been practicing psychiatric medicine for seventeen years. I started down this path because I thought understanding how minds worked -how my mind worked- would provide the miraculous insight that would set me free, heal me, make me whole. But there is no liberation to be found in insight. Just a dopamine hit that will slowly wane until you score the next insight. The entire self-help industry is built on this.
Action is the only way forward. And what I’ve learned is that the most important thing to building a meaningful life is resilience. For me, resilience is the capacity to tolerate and navigate discomfort. Medicine can alleviate the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Meditation and other skills can mitigate these also. However, the absence of pain is only the removal of a barrier. If you stand still long enough, something is going to come along and rebuild it.
Social media influencers pretending to be therapists will tell you that it’s ok to make your life’s goal to never experience discomfort. You should build an identity out of clusters of symptoms and once you have a word for that cluster, you are not responsible for anything that emanates from it. You should cocoon yourself in your avoidance strategies and distractions.
The appeal of this is understandable. We live in challenging, even horrific, times. There are so many awful things outside our power to influence, so why not avoid any inconveniences that are within our power to avoid?
Because avoidance is the path to a shrinking world.
If you suffer from anxiety, as many of us do, there is great appeal in trying to understand the nature of and triggers for your anxiety. And once identifying those, perfectly natural to do your best to avoid them. But those are simply objects. If you successfully eliminate your exposure to all of them, you find yourself in a world with much narrower boundaries than the one you inhabited before, and the same processes that projected danger onto the larger world, will absolutely identify targets in the smaller one. You can continue this process until your entire world consists of your immediate living space, and you will still find something threatening there.
Avoidance of discomfort will take everything away from you worth living for and leave you wondering why, having eliminated every difficult thing you could identify, you feel as bad or worse than you did at the start.
Every good thing we do for ourselves is an exercise in managing discomfort. Building meaningful relationships, creating art, being comfortable in your body. Despite all my training and practice in psychology and psychiatry, I am terrified of emotional intimacy. Every deep conversation, every real connection I make, is a moment-to-moment battle against my core belief that trusting people with my feelings isn’t safe, that I will be rejected and ridiculed, that I will only feel more alone. And having fought through all that, there is now the knowledge that the ultimate consequence of making that connection is quite possibly grief so painful that at times it feels like it will consume me. Grief is the final boss of navigating discomfort. It will tell you that everything you build is for nothing and that the best way to avoid pain is by closing yourself off completely.
Life is characterized by an essential unsatisfactoriness. This is it. You work your ass off for something and then it gets taken away from you. Nothing is permanent, good or bad, and it seems the best things are the most fleeting and you find yourself at times wishing you never found them because the loss is so devastating. The universe is unjust and indifferent to our pain. The world is a scratcher. We can give it the best instructions, can do our part, but still it leaves us walking away with a sh*tty tattoo and way more hurt than we bargained for. But tattoos also tell a story, fragile and beautiful and uniquely ours.
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