An Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story that I read in the middle of the night last night. Sometimes, my anemia cause me to pass out at 6:30 and then I wake up at 2am and read essays.  

"I’ve told a lot of harrowing stories about those four months in Indonesia, but this is the part I always leave out, the detail that undoes the narrative I’ve spent the better part of my adult life trying to construct: Throughout it all, I was in pain. Throughout my entire adult life, in fact—eleven years—I’ve been in varying degrees of it, sometimes crippling, other times a low hum that has become the background noise of my life. Either way, it’s burrowed so deep in me that it has become one of the most defining parts of myself, the origin of every desire and every fear, the place I spend the majority of my energy either tending to or ignoring. At 21, when I was diagnosed, I flew home to California for a year to recover, but in those three intervening years between my diagnosis and this misguided volcano hike, I hadn’t gotten much better. My life, once full of ambition, had slowed, but, before this trip, I still thought of myself a certain way, thought, this isn’t really my life—I’m just on a break. I still felt like I could be the author of my own story. But pain, as Melanie Thernstrom says in The Pain Chronicles, rewrites us. And to admit that pain had rewritten me felt like an unforgiveable failure, an admittance of shame."- The Art of Omission by Simone Gorrindo