Daily (w)rite

When it comes to poetry, I admit I am a little cynical. I write poems, but they are not really things I’d rather put up on a blog.

Rick Mobbs, who is an artist by profession, but a painter and poet at heart has asked me more than once to share with him the fiction I have been writing. Uh, I thought, why not poetry? Maybe go the whole hog and make a complete fool of myself?

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Writing about making chicken soup was not on the top of my list of things to do today, but then I thought, well, why the heck not?

It was like this: I heard some really, really, really bad news. My uncle lost his battle with cancer.

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This was a post I had done ages ago. A cherished few of you, who used to visit my old blog, might recognize it. I am posting it today (with an update) because I cannot forget dear, dear Sam for more reasons than I care to count.

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When I wrote the post on the relationship between writing and pain, I knew I would have to go through what I am now, the surgery was planned quite some time ago.

I have a scar on my face, the result of an excision, and boy, it hurts! The scar throbs every time I look down, and I haven’t yet figured out a way to not look down when I’m writing.

Hopefully it will all get better soon, but till then, writing every word is a pain, literally! A bit like Harry Potter’s throbbing scar, I keep telling myself, only the darn thing throbs all the time. My husband looks at the stitches in rapt fascination, cos you can see them clearly under the redness and the transparent bit of plaster. Sometimes I feel he wishes he had it instead, boys and scars have a fascinating relationship:).

But it was an experience really, this whole excision thing, painless other than a few anesthetic injections, and the near headache I got from trying not to look at the glaring operation lights. But I could feel the blood trickling down my face, the doc working fast and easy with a thin thread to do the stitching, and I could smell the burning when the laser switched on.

The whole idea of broken skin is familiar, because I have been accident-prone the past year, small cuts, burns, broken bones. But deliberate cutting of flesh is something else. And so is the sight of blood-soaked cotton on the floor when I was asked to get up from the operating bed.

It is a bit hard for me to think of all the acres of tattoos decorating human bodies all over the world, how people undergo repeated pain in order to deliberately mark their bodies.

And harder still is the thought of all those people who go under the knife time and time again to change their looks: citizens of the glam world I understand, for them looks are livelihood, but what about suburban housewives who go through months of pain to transform themselves, getting addicted in the process?

What about people who get off on pain? Interesting thought, that, one that is a complete mystery to me.

Aargh, there goes my scar again, throb, throb, pull, pull,…….time to go back to some patient roof-staring till the pain subsides, and I can continue writing!

Sometimes it is a sentence heard out of context, from an unlikely source that gives meaning to what is going on in your life. 

Yesterday, I was watching a drop-dead gorgeous movie superstar being interviewed on TV, and the interviewer asked him about a not-such-a-good career phase of his life, a string of flops after a debut hit. 

And he said, “Well, it was also the period of my life when I was working hard on the movie that made me who I am today. 

That dark period of critical and popular oblivion was an incredibly depressing experience full of suffering. But I used it to ask questions, to find answers, to channel those answers into creative channels and evolve as an actor.

 
 I believe that it is important not just to survive through a difficult experience, but to actually use it to bounce back: if you do not ask the right questions when you are suffering, you are likely to merely live through it instead of evolving through it”.

 
This is excellent within the realm of materialism, but it also makes a great deal of sense in the spiritual part our lives.

They say that “Suffering ennobles a man”, but we know different. Suffering leaves some of us bitter, turns others into villains.

 
But only those of us who ask the “right” questions during their suffering, and reach out for the “right” answers are made more noble.