You can have a hurt in your gut radiating out, sucking you in upon yourself.

You may find that you can only travel so deep within yourself before getting heat from the inside by the flat of a shovel / before a hoplite regiment, shields linked and spears out, heaves you out of yourself.

You can go to therapy only to again reach a certain point into the scribbling screaming panicking hurt before getting kicked out. But now you are sitting up and you jerk your head and neck and shoulder to one side, like something disgusting has been shoved in your head. And you’re once again ejected out to the surface of your conscious space.

You can lie in your bed at night, watching your conscious space from the inside, trying to see where you are, hovering in confusion around a barfing screaming thrashing grieving hurt in your gut and swirling out like scribbles and tossing tentacles at the borders, and tugging inward on all sides as if seeking implode you like a submarine that’s slipped to deep beneath the deep dark sea. You can lie there, trying to fill your whole conscious space — including this mayhem in your pit. Only to of course every time yell out with a short sharp “uh!” like someone’s whacked you across your gut with the backside of a shovel. You’re tossed right out of yourself again. Hmmph.

Maybe before you didn’t used to know about the hurt. Something kept tripping you up, undermining your resolve, kicking your feet out from under you, shoving you into fantasy salvations, give-ups and other desperate collapses. The hurt was then wispily, diffusely and subtly poisoning your heart and mind.

Maybe once you were walking on a nice smooth sidewalk and something about a building you see shoved you down into the sidewalk on a cheery spring day. You are driven down into the ground by you know not what slow-crushing push-down. It hurts not physical nor even quite emotional. It hurts like evil, like horror, like nightmare suffocation. After a while you stand up confused and walk home with the weirdness hovering unexamined over your shoulders, not even deciding to do what you are already doing: ignoring the incident until fifteen years later when the hurt morphs from lacing the back of your mind/body to screaming loud and clear from your gut out, crumpling you up like a giant hand wrapping around your backside, driving your shoulders in and down and you sex in and up.

Why the switch? Something caused you to spend months trying to tell yourself the truth. And then out tumbles this hurt, this wound, this smashed glass in clay-like junkyard dirt. A sickness. A disgust. A defeat. A “you lose”. Tearing through you. Grinding you down.

What is going on? You do not know. You call it the “hurt”. It makes no sense. There’s nothing to say.

What can you do? About this hurt, I mean?

But you know, when you finally become aware of the hurt’s presence within yourself, it is at some level a tremendous relief. You experience it like a discovery. Something like one of those films where there’s always been a mountain at the back of the village and now you realize that a magical kingdom lies behind it — now that you’ve fought your way up and through a hundred narrow, winding, apparently-issueless rockways. This particular kingdom is kind of terrible, but you still feel very lucky to find it. Now you know what angry spirits are attacking your otherwise safe and snug mountainside village. Now you know there’s a problem — not just some problems that sometimes with no explanation swell up to sweep across and overturn your happy home. Now you know what the problem is and so you can begin to search for a solution, or at least perhaps a path forward towards a better future.

Author: Captain John Terrible
Editors: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Producer/Copyright: AM Watson