You guys, this is kind of gross, and I’m sorry for that, but I can’t say what I want to say without going there. So… this post is about vomit. And if that’s going to bother you, maybe look elsewhere.

There’s been a lot of heartbreak and loss in my world over the last four months. Most of it not mine… I’ve had a bit, and it’s been rough, but several friends of mine have suffered much more catastrophic losses, and I’ve been close by during the aftermath. So I’ve been thinking a lot about pain, and loss, and the experience of dealing with them.

And yesterday I had a bout of stomach upsettedness, don’t know where it came from, but there it was, and I couldn’t help drawing analogies. Because both things go more or less the same way. It comes in waves, right? You feel generally unsettled and wrong, and impaired in your life… and then the feeling intensifies… and then you just can’t concentrate on anything because of how bad it is… and then your entire world is consumed by the awfulness of what you’re feeling, and it’s unbearable, and you think you’re about to die and wish you would. And then it’s over. You’re shaken, you’re white, but you feel, actually, fine. Like you can get up and live life normally. And you do, for a little while. And then the unsettled-ness starts to come back, and the whole cycle begins again.

Whenever I’m sick to my stomach, at first I fight the urge to vomit. Like I can somehow prevent my being actually-sick by preventing that obvious symptom. This holds out, sometimes, for the first couple of cycles, but by the time those are over I’ve clued in to how much better I feel if I just let it come. Sure, that moment when your whole body is given over to the sickness, that’s an awful moment. But you pass through it, and then you have the few minutes or hours of being okay. The awful will come back. But so will the okay. And because you have a body that heals, the awful won’t come back forever. (Though for some people it lasts a long, long time… I’m thinking of my friend with hyperemesis gravidarum, and honestly, I can’t imagine.) It’s much better to let the awfulness peak and ebb than to draw it out in sustained misery.

I’m learning a pain-coping strategy that is similar. There’s no need to dwell, to fix attention on what’s been lost, or what can’t be had. Awareness of it will creep in without a lot of effort or invitation. And when it does, when it gets so bad that I can’t distract myself, my strategy is to let it be, let it grow, let it get to that point where it consumes my body and my mind and there’s nothing else in my world. Because that state can’t last forever, and afterward I get a span of peace.

I don’t know if doing this gets the healing done any faster, but it feels better to me. More tolerable, even though the peaks of awfulness are absolutely intolerable. When I’m fighting the awfulness, trying to keep it from peaking, it adds another level of tension to my already-racked body. If I surrender to it, I am expressing my trust that my body is stronger than the awfulness, that I will heal. Even at the worst moments, that brings some comfort.