What does a scanner see?

Continuing my thoughts on strong feelings, today I would like to address pain. Specifically how it alters the way you look at the world. Pain is, it seems, the one thing that your brain can't get used to. This colors the world around you in that, if you have an injury like me, everything you see is a rating of how much pain it will cause you. Each step becomes an exercise in damage control instead of the thoughtless exercise most people enjoy. It is hard to make that clear to people, and can make for some very frustrating conversations. You get tired of explaining yourself, especially to people who are close to you and have dealt with you on a regular basis.

It also darkens your world view quite a bit. As an introvert who suffers from social fatigue, I have spent most  of my life in self-reflection. I have also spent my entire life battling the fugue of depression that is always lurking in the periphery of my mind. Thus my world view was darkened from the outset, but the pain compounded it more than I thought possible. In depression, you can stave it off occasionally. Through fun, distraction, success, or relaxation the depression could be kept at bay for sometimes months at a time. The same cannot be said of the pain. It never goes away entirely. Medicines give temporary easing, ice can reduce swelling, and exercise can help strengthen the muscles. But it is still there. The best thing I can hope for when I go to bed is that the next morning might hurt slightly less.

I think you can see where this is all going.

When I, or someone like me, looks out at the world it is not a pretty picture. Some would call the situation 'hopeless'. But that would disregard my next point, which is that pain can put things into perspective. It fundamentally changes the world you live in. You begin to forget small things, to be able to communicate certain needs and wants, and it can utterly consume your life if you are not paying attention.

The world becomes murky, and you begin to despair. Everything dims, and hope becomes a poisoned trap that feeds into the dark fog that gathers at the edges of your perception. As the shadows close in, the mind gets lost when it tries to look inside yourself, and no one can even tell what is happening to you. This is compounded by the opiates which disassociate you from reality and can distance you from situations that need your utmost attention and feeds the apathy that accompanies depression.

So when you are talking to someone who suffers from pain or depression, remember this: There is a darkness inside the person you care about that is deep and terrible. It cannot be forgotten about lest you find yourself blindsided by the tumultuous hell brewing just below the surface of the person you are trying to talk to. It can hurt both sides and the last thing the person feeling the pain or depression is to inflict those feelings on the people they love.

The other reason not to forgot what these feelings are doing to your loved ones is that it can be hard to see through the gloom that sits over their minds. I cannot emphasize enough how hard it can be to see through those clouds. How easy it can be to lose yourself in the haze is as hard to make other people understand as the pain and depression themselves. So I will close with a quote that helps put it in perspective

"What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me, into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly, because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better. Because if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again. I'll only wind up dead this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too." -Bob Arctor A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.

A Reckoning (of sorts)

I drove down the central avenue of the university for the first time in a year, and it felt odd. Nothing had changed, hell even the people looked similar, but it still felt like I was seeing the place for the first time. It drifted past my eyes like the haunting melody of some childhood tune that I couldn't remember hearing but I could not get out of my head all the same. Though it had only been a year, and nothing about it was different, but still it appeared alien.
The slow realization dawned that, like the distance between me and that childhood melody, it was I that had changed. The distance was my own, built on enough change in myself to create the feeling of a lifetime between now and the last time I had made this simple, half a mile drive.
That night I slept with a soundness that I have only experienced a handful of times. I closed my eyes enveloped in the walls of this strange canyon of time, and I slept in the echoing song of memories as they tried to bridge this gap.
When I woke I made a discovery that was so personally profound that all I could muster was a half-hearted "hmph."
I had discovered that now, after years of pretending, I am and perhaps always have been an adult. This notion made me smile a deep, warm, and quiet smile. Breakfast tasted better because it was a breakfast that I had chosen and purchased with my skills and knowledge. Playing with the cats was more fun because I cared for them and they cared for me. Spending time with that lovely woman in my life was more fulfilling than it ever had been because I really, finally understood what the years we had spent together really meant in terms of patience, sacrifice, and growth. I loved her more than I ever could have before because I didn't know (and likely still don't) how much deeper that feeling could go.
I will have more to say on the subject later, but I wanted to get this out while it was fresh.

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