The Flawed Ceiling of Pain by Sean Ash

Pain manifests itself as a concrete ceiling that cannot be transcended. It commands us to stop everything that we are doing and submit to its higher authority. It acts as a despot ruling over its subject by draconian laws that cannot be contested.

So many times, pain has left us immobile. It has convinced us that we are beneath it. It has destroyed many dreams, crumbled aspirations, torn confidences and invoked vulnerabilities. Revolutions and cures replaced by prescription drugs that keep us locked within our cycles of pain.

It imprisons us within a cell yet leaves all doors unlocked and wide open. We get so used to our painful conditioning that we become scared to leave. It steals those close to us and strips us of the very things that we have spent years working very hard to achieve. Pain casts it's shackles around our ankles and enslaves us to it.

So many times I have pondered, considering to end my own life because the pain was so great that it had made me feel despair. Hopelessness to the point, where all purpose is lost.

It pushes us into a deep well coloured in darkness. A well where wishes are nothing but echoes of our own cries, reminding us that wishes don't always come true.

I would sometimes find myself down at the bottom, feeling so exhausted from all my pain and suffering, that I would fall into a short, momentary deep sleep, that is, until the pain acted like an alarm clock waking me up again for more.

I felt like this pain would certainly lead me to my death, but no matter how agonising and how much it made me cry out, curse and scream, and despite the feeling of death seeming as close to me as my own shadow, I never did die from it. I survived it every time. It was nothing more than a storm passing.

The problem was that I became so conditioned being at the bottom of that well, that I gave up with looking up. I became so distracted by the fall, that I replaced climbing with learning how best to fall. Always thinking I could go lower and that things could always get worse for me. Dreading hitting the bottom.

However, It was within my fall that I discovered a contradiction to my thinking. I originally believed that pain was a ceiling made of concrete, hanging over me, yet here I found myself, laying on a concrete floor, mistakenly thinking that I was always going lower when I could go no lower.

I turned my head the other way and looked out through the open top of the well; out into the blue sky, beyond the clouds and still not a concrete ceiling could be seen. It was then I realised that the concrete ceiling wasn't a ceiling at all. Pain was in fact a concrete floor. So I got up.