I’ve been in a lot of pain lately. Relentless, chronic pain. My bones ache; my muscles are in spasm, but I don’t know why. Hey, I'm a cop and footballer; I’m used to pain—the kind that comes from hard work, from hard contact. But this pain is something new. It’s everywhere, it’s deep inside, and it changes shape all the time: headache yesterday; backache today. It’s always there, and it’s all I can think about.
The police shrink calls it somatization, says I'm physicalizing deep suppressed emotion. “What’s bothering you?” she asked me in my mandatory bi-weekly session. Bothering me? Lady, how much time ya got? Let’s see—there’s my suspension, a serial killing case I’m locked out of, and evidence tampering charges hanging over my head. Oh, yeah, and a kid who keeps running off. “Your son running off,” she said, blank-faced, “how does that make you feel?” How do I fucking feel? Like doing damage to the asshole who's pulling my kid away. “That’s not an emotion,” she said. “That’s a reaction. Take a moment and search yourself for how you feel.”
Angry. Powerless. Rejected. Lost and alone.
Shit, I hate when she does that. Somehow she always brings it back to my days on the street—and my mom. I don’t understand it; my mom died when I was three, but somehow I’m still suffering from it. “Losing your mother was traumatic,” the shrink said. “You need to allow yourself to grieve, and mourn her loss.”
How did I feel about that, you ask? I'll tell you how I felt: I stormed out of the shrink's office. Oh, yeah, right, that’s not an emotion.
The emotions came later—about ten minutes later, on the Métro. I just…lost it. I fell apart on the frigging Métro. It was humiliating. I ducked out at the next station and into the first bar I could find. Whisky, I thought, would dull the pain.
Except, I had no more pain, just a wet face and a wounded ego. The pain that had been plaguing me had dissipated somewhere between the Cité and Châtelet stations. The physical pain, at least. I’ve just begun to learn how to manage the emotional pain.
