“Mask of Pain”
By: CJ
People ask how I’m so happy all the time. It’s because I hide the worst fucking depression you’ve ever seen. I sleep at night not caring if I wake up. And still I wake up every hour drenched in sweat from things I’ve seen and done.
The world doesn’t need more negativity. The world is fucked up as it is. The mask that I use is for others benefit. It’s meant to brighten their day, since my days and nights are filled with horror. Anxiety hits out of nowhere and cripples me, but yet I still need to do my job. No one knows and no one cares. They only care what the mask shows.
I’ve sat with a knife to my skin, just wanting to hurt myself. Just to hurt myself. I crave the pain and the agony. Ive sat with a gun in my hands, wondering what it would be like. Wondering the noise it would make or the feeling if any I would feel. I’ve punched telephone poles until my knuckles bled just to feel something or anything to keep my mind from wandering.
There’s so much bullshit in the world. Nothing is fucking happy. There’s always something. A man beats his wife or kids, mom does drugs and doesn’t tell anyone, Dad drinks every fucking night and slowly gets more and more abusive. Mom leaves her husband with the kids and goes out to whore and drink every night.
People die in my arms and there’s nothing I can do. People stop breathing and I see the life fade from their eyes and listen to their lungs stop working. That’s the worst feeling in the world. Knowing they have someone who cared about them and you were the last person to touch them and not do a fucking thing. Wether it’s a druggie on his 10th overdose or a pregnant mom of 2 there’s no solace. You don’t “help the best you can” you fucking fail and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you had driven faster, if you had given narcan sooner, if you started compressions a few seconds earlier, what if. What if. What if. What fucking if matters.
But no. People don’t see that. They see you sitting in a car, drinking coffee and writing tickets. They don’t give a fuck how you feel inside. Or the shit that we do that fucks our lives up for the rest of our careers. They don’t see the ruined family lives at home from spouses who don’t know how to handle what we do.
Pain is what makes my life go on. Alcohol hides it momentarily but it’s not a cure. It ruins your mind and slowly your life. There comes a point where you drink to be normal and that’s a dark place to be. People don’t live with a constant shadow following them, questioning every move, every though and every action. People don’t look at a bridge and go ‘what would it feel like if I jumped’ or thought ‘I have my gun with me. What would the reaction be if I killed myself here and now’. Normal people don’t do that. Normal people just want to see a mask. ‘How are you’ ‘good’ end of conversation.
Pain quickly becomes a necessary feeling. When you shit your humanity off day after day, week after week, soon you just become numb. All you can feel is pain and despair. I’ve cut, I’ve burned, but what I’ve found the best is the iron. To walk into a gym and crank my music up so loud I can’t hear my demons, and to just make myself HURT. To absolutely destroy my body, knowing that not only will it keep my head alive, I’ll get pain from it. But a constructive pain. The scars from lifting make me stronger. They make me the hardest person someone will ever try to kill. A lot of people don’t get that. They can’t fathom the idea of every day having your head on a swivel, knowing that someone out there wants to kill you. And I’ll be fucked if I’m going to go down without a fight.
