Pain Points

You made me a believer - or did you?

“Oh let the bullets fly, oh let them rain. My life, my love, my drive, it came from
Pain!” - Imagine Dragons

Pain Points

I.
Until I was six I lived for joy,
for the exquisite pleasure
of walking bare foot and unwashed
into shadow-speckled morning sun,
into grass left unmowed for weeks,
trailing my hand along the honeysuckle blossoms,
welcoming bees who wanted to hitch a ride.

Until I was six, I collected happy dots,
spirals of color I inscribed
with red, blue, and black Bic pens
on my hands and feet.
One tiny dot for every sighting -
bird wings, pill bugs, and squirrels.
Bigger whorls were reserved
for closer encounters -
puppy breath and butterfly wings
kissing my cheek;
running full tilt from the grumpy gander
honking his outrage as he nipped my heels;
standing nose-to-nose
with my neighbor’s blue-roan pony
as a blanket of stillness embraced us.

II.
My mother put a kibosh on dots,
(when a teacher mistook them for ringworm)
and signed me up for swim team.
There, dolphin antics -
chattering, tail walking, and water squirting -
were verboten,
and the chlorinated water bleached all evidence
of my spotty obsession
from my skin.

It was swimming
that taught me the currency of pain -
the many and nuanced ways it could be used
to motivate, reward, and abuse -
the assumption being
that failure to improve
indicated insufficient deposits
into the pain account.

III.
No pain, no gain
dogged me into adulthood -
through Olympic trials,
“higher” education,
and IOU relationships -
through endless résumé revisions,
skill assessments, and
Oscar-worthy job interviews
that left me existing
wraith-like and hollow
within a shell of respectability.

These days,
pain has been renamed.
Laying claim to words like resilient,
resolute, and unbreakable,
it sears the soles of children
with rules and tests and grades
and binds their feet
with the belief
that creative self-expression
is a minefield of mistakes
leading to failure.

IV.
The price of pain is erasure -
a slow but steady decline
into translucence.
The meticulously maintained mask
dissolves into wrinkles
and porous bones.
Eyes sink deep in sockets
and veins emerge like monsters
from beneath your bed,
testifying to torture.

But I am done with pain
with the incessant, niggling voices
of Never Enough and Shame.
I’m listening instead
to the six-year-old
whose tiny, colored dots
infuse my first-light thoughts
and dance my days to sleep
with memories of birds calls
and the soft green scent of a pony’s breath
as we breathe each other in.

Copyright 2024 by Jena Ball. All Rights Reserved

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So tell me friends, what are your feelings about this song and its lyrics? Do you feel there are benefits to having experienced pain? How do you think its negative effects can best be overcome? Do you have any stories of how pain has shaped your life?

P.S. This is Russell Harvard signing “Believer” by Imagine Dragons. He is an American actor who was born into a third generation deaf family. Though he can hear some with the help of hearing aids, he considers his first language to be ASL.

I was stunned when I saw his signed interpretation. If you click on the image above you can see the Instagram version. Here is the Facebook version as well: https://www.facebook.com/reel/3334417236833366

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