A Structure Of Pain.

They began construction on a tutoring centre behind the pottery shed, but for some reason or other, they abandoned the project. Maybe there was a dispute over the land. Maybe the land just wouldn't relent to more academia. The new tutoring centre was set up in the basement of one of the existing buildings instead and the half-built room was left standing — no windows, doors nor a ceiling — a forgotten structure that bore no mention on the map of the school. If it ever happens, once centuries pass, that a cartographer tries to recreate that educational institution, perhaps after it is buried in rubble following a terrible incident, they will not know to rebuild that room. No one will ever know it was there. I wonder how it feels, to be vaporised from history, it will happen to me too, and I won't be able to experience it, so I attempt to simulate it now, like yearning for the nostalgia of history's past, as I live it. As I *am* it. I used to go to the abandoned room to hide from no one in particular, maybe it was just the unrelenting clangour of people, that was defeaning.

In a sense, it was a room shared by the broken children. The kind that loved school, because home, was more terrifying that an old shack buried in old leaves, littered with broken glass, infested with insects we couldn't even identify. People get mad at me when I use the term broken, but we were, it's not because we couldn't ever fix our problems, no, brokenness is about being hopeless. Our little shed was a hopeless place. My friend Ruby used to go there, her dad was being investigated for raping a minor and she had almost been expelled for abusing prescription medication she had stolen from her mom who hadn't left her bedroom in several years. Tanvi used to go there too. She has a growth disorder and a hormonal issue that made her the centre of some of the worst bullying I have ever seen in my life, we got her a cake for her eighteenth birthday and when she saw it she had the most terrifying emotional breakdown I have ever witnessed. Months later she explained that she couldn't believe there was a single person in the world who even knew she existed. Raunak used to go there too, he was gay in a town that celebrated every trait of masculinity that turns to toxicity  in a heartbeat. We read Justine together. I don't know why. I still have the copy we shared, but he's gone. Hopeless places do that to you.

There were some well-meaning, measured adults who saw what we were going through, they gave us their sympathy and nothing more in calculated portions that allowed them to feel like good people.

"It will get better," they used to tell us.

The thing is, for most of us, it did get better, but that isn't a message of hope, there is something so profoundly offensive about the fact that it is always the children who seem to be suffering the most. We grow up, we remove the emotion from the stories of our lives, we find the humour, if we are lucky, we build safety for ourselves, and we pretend that our childhoods were normal. We remove the lens of pain and the sympathetic eyes through which we assessed our pain as we grew up. After all, everyone has a bad childhood, right? If we all believe that, then some of us don't have to reveal how bad it really was, and if we don't reveal it, no one does that double-take of pity when we utter deep trauma like it's just a normal thing. I do this all the time. I have normalised everything that has ever happened to me to the point that I believe every single person was just as traumatized and should focus on their pain. If we're all emerging from rooms of broken children, I'm not so weird. If we are all coming from the same place, the room isn't even relevant, it doesn't even need to be on the map.

I pretend the room doesn't exist on my map.

I'm not actively suffering. I'm not. The fact that I am suffering is not hidden in the cervices of my functionality, it is demonstrated by my obsession with my functionality. I turned my pain into discipline, scheduled, structure, organisational skills, achievement, ambition. They're all good things, but my fixation on them isn't good. Somehow, I have learnt that I must regimentalise everything. Like a toddler in a pre-school, I structure my "play-time." I turn every thought into action, sounds like a good thing, but when I run out of my own things to do, I do the things of other people. A part of the truth is that people are like projects to me and my helpless hubris allows me to believe I can help them all. It's not a leap. No one came for us in that abandoned room, so we come for others in the hope that doing that will allow us to erase the room from our memories. I cannot see others in pain, emotional pain, because it takes a second for me to physically experience their pain within the recesses of my pain, but helping people is self-aggrandising prophecy, in some senses. In others, you come to realise, people don't need help, they often just want someone to blame. In "helping people", I am happy to be a punching bag.

"If blaming me helps someone deal with their issues or make their lives easier, how does it hurt me?" I used to say.

I remember the day I decided to see it that way. My mother told me she wanted to divorce my father, she had attempted to take her life and in the aftermath of that she said she would never be happy if she stayed with him. My personal issues with my mother notwithstanding, I told her I would support her because she shouldn't have had to stay in a deeply, violently abusive marriage that was robbing her sanity. She was worried she would have no money to raise us because she had cheated on my dad, and I told her that we would find a way, she would savour independence much more than sushi. I will not change that belief for the world. When my mother told my father about her plans, he decided that it was my fault. He beat me and tossed me out in the street where the neighbours could hear them berating me, telling me that if I lived on the streets for a while I would realise how lucky I was to have them, my mother added that the lack of food would probably do my weight some good. During the commotion I realised my mother had led him to believe the divorce was my idea, much later at night when I lay in bed, bruised and terrified and ashamed, I decided not to say anything to him.

Or her.

If blaming me helps someone deal with their issues or makes their life easier, how does it hurt me?

It doesn't. Nothing hurts me. I am blind to my own pain. It's *void ab initio*. Because I am strong, you know? I don't need to tell people when they are hurting me, I can take it. I don't need my suffering to be heard, I know how to manage it perfectly. I have structured my pain so I can deal with it and maintain perfect functionality. You know how some people don't want to be an emotional burden on others so they are reserved? I don't even want to register on someone's radar of emotion detection. If you do indeed teach people how to treat you, then I have successfully taught everyone in my life that there is never any need to consider me or my feelings at all. I have taught them that I am a vault for their secrets, a repository for their blame and a priest to exonerate their guilt. I wouldn't say this to people, I wouldn't want them inconvenienced by the realisation that I am a human being.

I wouldn't want myself inconvenienced by that either.

I will do what I always do. I will disappear into the half-finished shack where I house all my pain. I will sit amongst the leaves and broken shards of glass, and tend to my brokenness, alone. I will rearrange the structure so it continues to make sense. I will think about the other broken children, I was wonder about their lives. For a moment I will feel hopeless and lost in time.  

And then I will leave.

Because this is not a hopeless place. My pain is not a permanent structure. It is not stable. It is one tiny corner of my story. It won't last the eternity that is my life. One day I will really be able to leave it off the map, and that day, let's hope to goodness,  I won't be meticulously following a schedule that feels like sanity.