Raw

When I take stitches out, the ques­tion is always, ”Will it hurt.” When these things that are hold­ing me together get taken away, will that process cause pain? The deeper ques­tion starts to look like this…When I fall apart and am left with a raw wound, how will I live with that pain? How will I tol­er­ate see­ing my insides exposed, even if it is just the inside of a lit­tle length of my skin? Will this hurt? Can I trust that the heal­ing you talked about is done? Can I trust myself to heal? Can I find a way to live with being exposed? Are you trust­wor­thy? Am I the one kind of per­son who just can’t heal, who stub­bornly refuses to knit back together? Will I stay rav­eled? Will become unraveled?

And me, glibly, even patron­iz­ingly, pater­nally, ”Yes. I mean No. You will, you have, it won’t, stay still.”

I hurt peo­ple for a liv­ing. The gift of the pain I bring, I hope, is heal­ing. The heal­ing is not my ter­ri­tory. I am on the hurt­ing side of it – use the knife, put holes in things, take things out. The knit­ting, heal­ing, reju­ve­nat­ing, the mir­a­cle part, hap­pens later and is not my busi­ness. It hap­pens while you are sleep­ing. I show up again at the end and take out stitches, and maybe I act as if I was the wiz­ard behind the cur­tain who made the edges of the skin find each other. Maybe I remem­ber my real place in the process. Know this: it wasn’t me. You paid me to trau­ma­tize this tis­sue, hope­fully in a way that some­how results in some­thing you wanted. After that it is all you, your body, G..d, nature. By the time you heal I might as well be in that vac­uum that nature abhors.

Surgery is like a con­trolled burn. It is good for you, really, it is. But there are days when my impact is not sur­gi­cal, when deci­sions I make bring pain that burns for real. Today was that day for me. The fires were sweep­ing through my life and the lives of peo­ple I care about deeply. I had to lay off peo­ple from jobs they do well, will­ingly and with love. I had to serve some other pur­pose, and I ques­tion that at my deep­est level. I feel like my own skin is off, mus­cle exposed, tat­tered. I feel so sad.

It is a human expe­ri­ence, the heal­ing that fol­lows the pain. The pain pro­tects us from con­tin­u­ing to injure our­selves. It forces us to ask for help, to rest, to get water and food. I can only trust that the fiery pain out there in my world of influ­ence today is fol­lowed by a mirac­u­lous, drench­ing, sooth­ing rain and that the peace­ful waters will bring the same kind of heal­ing I have noth­ing to do with in the oper­a­tions I do.