Hurting

Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free
by Mary D. Esselman, Elizabeth Ash Vélez

One day, it just happens. You completely snap. Your last single friend announces her engagement to the schmo she met two months ago, or your married boss hits on you just when you think you've managed to impress him with your work smarts, or you're forced off the sidewalk by a J.Crew couple and their double-barreled baby stroller. It's all too much. It might not be dramatic-a sudden freak-out or breakdown. It could simply be the cumulative effect of watching the world surge past and around you-the showers, the weddings, the new houses, the better jobs, the damn baby photos. Everyone else seems to know what she wants-and how to get it-yet you consistently feel overlooked, underloved, and, let's face it, screwed, in every way except literally.

You know you shouldn't feel this way. You don't want to become some whiney malcontent. But you can't shake this unresolved restlessness, this nameless dissatisfaction with your life. You've tried to put it in perspective-there's real tragedy in the world, real crisis and pain-you know, you know, you know. You know Fran the receptionist still aches for her husband, dead ten years, and you watched your friend Meg fight a brutal, losing battle with cancer. You've seen what illness and death and estrangement can do. You carry all sorts of loss within you.

That's why the baby stroller people or the smarmy boss or the schmo-marrying friend put you right over the edge-you're tired of losing people and losing hope. You feel a great longing for companionship and connectedness, for knowing that what you do means something, for gratification and peace of mind, but it keeps eluding you despite your best efforts. And every reminder of this longing cuts into your spirit again and again until you just can't take it. When will you stop feeling so bereft, mourning what you've lost (friends, true loves, your mother's approval) and what you've never had (the little household of your dreams, a soul-fulfilling vocation, your mother's approval)?

One way to start feeling better is to give yourself permission to kick and wail and grieve. Let the poets in Hurting help you express all of it-the rage, the despair, the what-am-I-doing-with-my-life agony. Think of this section as one big scream of frustration. All we know is that we just feel pain, the kind that comes from being scraped in the same place over and over again. Like the speaker in Lola Haskins's “Love,” we're raw with feeling, oversensitized to everything that's ever hurt us. We don't know quite what's hit us, we just feel our skin's been ripped off.

But deep down, we really do know what's hit us-crushing disappointment after disappointment. Some big (your parents were supposed to stay together forever), some small (that cellulite was supposed to disappear after you went off the Pill), and some that we try to say are small when we know they're really big (we were supposed to have snagged The One, flex-timed The Job, and delivered The Kids before The Fertility Plunge). Tack on general injustice, poverty, and terror, and you feel too bruised to bear it.

What gets us is the “why” of it all. Why us? Did we ask for any of this? Weren't we entitled to something else? The speaker in Dorothy Parker's ironically named “Fulfillment” seems incredulous that this kind of pain is her reward for becoming a reasonably well-raised adult. “For this my mother wrapped me warm . . . And gave me roughage in my diet”? she asks. All so I could “grow to womanhood” and “break my heart to clattering bits”?

Talk about roughage in the diet-when you feel this forsaken, every disappointment seems too tough to digest. And we make matters worse by chewing each one to death! Somehow, perversely, we feed our own despair. We keep careful track of every little thing that has hurt us, we nurse our grudges, we stay in the very situations that bring us down.

Look at the lovers in Anna Akhmatova's “We Don't Know How to Say Goodbye.” The two of them are a picture of gloom-he's moody, she's his shadow, and they're sitting on a frozen branch in a graveyard outside a church where masses for the dead are being said. Not exactly a Harlequin romance! So why are they still together? If she wants to stop feeling “so different from the rest”-if, like a lot of women we know, she wants a sunny bungalow of family happiness-then why is she willing to settle for his stick picture of a mansion in the snow? Why can't she find a way to say goodbye?

Maybe it's because she can't conceive of any identity for herself outside of him. Maybe it's because some relationships are just too difficult to sever-you can't just cut your father or your boss out of your life, no matter how “moody” (try “abusive”) they are, can you? Or your oldest friend? Sometimes staying stuck in misery seems easier than razing your old life and building a new one.

Copyright © by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez

About the Author

Elizabeth Ash Vélez lives in Washington, D.C.