I’ve never liked the word savory. It just doesn’t fit. Salty or spicy? Doesn’t fit. Especially when you think about someone saying they want to “savor” the moment.
I’m sitting at a coffee shop at 6 am crying. Writing. (YES I found one I can sit at and didn’t just buy a $7 coffee, I tipped them another $7!….THANK YOU for being open!) Then I sat down and realized I just paid $14 for a cup of coffee. What would my Folgers drinking dad say?
As I write I’m totally judging myself. I’ve been wrestling with my childhood trauma and the chest pain stuff for around a year and a half or longer. I mean seriously Chuck, get over it. Move on. What else could I possibly be processing? Yes, I’m healing. I’m looking at myself differently. I’m more healthy. For sure. And yet, still here, still crying, still judging myself. Oye.
Just 5 days after my dad died in 2004 I was crying after hearing a song and someone asked me, “When are you going to get over this?”. “Never”, I said. “There’s too much to learn from this and I don’t want to miss it.”
And here I am. Asking myself the same rude question. When am I going to get over this? I’m frustrated with myself. I’m pretty sure I’m wearing on people’s nerves and they are over it. Of course that’s the story I tell myself but people have been nothing but kind. But I’m afraid. I don’t like this. I wish I would have never opened the box. But it opened me. I’m tired of me. This me is lonely and afraid. Because this me wonders if today is his last day because of his heart. This me wonders if I will ever heal from the trauma of being abused and abandoned. This me wonders if the next email he gets is from someone close to him telling him that “they’re done”.
I remember as a teenager watching MASH with my mom. Every night at 10:30 we would turn it on and I would make myself a bowl of chocolate ice cream and cook a Totinos hamburger pizza. Every night. If I did that today I would weight 500 pounds within a month.
There was one episode where Hawkeye and Trapper wanted to order ribs from a place in Chicago called Adams Ribs. They were in Korea! Hawkeye talked about them as if they were the best ribs ever. He described one time having a cold sore on his mouth and the hot sauce from the ribs got in the sore and it hurt so bad but because it allowed him to taste the hot sauce longer, he savored the pain.
Savored the pain.
When and where do we ever savor pain? When we exercise and are sore we ice or stretch or take something. When we are injured we immediately try to fix the injury. When we are sad we try to cheer ourselves and others up. When we are angry we are told to keep it in. A friend of mine is a pain doctor. It’s all he does all day is try to eliminate pain. Many many medicines and therapies are designed around the idea of trying to eliminate pain. We’ve tried them all it seems like.
I sit in this chair and my chest hurts and my soul hurts. And I too want it to stop.
And then I think of Hawkeye. And when my dad died. And when my bike skidded on the gravel. And when my sister burned my lips with a car lighter. There’s a lot to learn in the pain. I want to savor it if I can.
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