A Bit Weary

When I was in junior high school there was this kid who could easily be referred to as an annoyance. He was the same age as me and I saw him at school often. He didn’t live too far from me so I saw him outside of school occasionally. The thing about him was that he often behaved in a way that provoked others. The combination of terms that would accurately describe him would be “annoying smart aleck / pain in the neck”. The thing is that he was a small guy, both in stature and in body frame. He probably couldn’t have protected himself physically against someone younger than himself. I could have easily beaten this kid into submission at any time, but I never did. I always knew that his behavior was a source of compensation for his physique and for issues that he was having at home. I chose to tolerate his behavior and withhold any retaliation. I wish now that I possessed the ability then to help him with counselling, but I was just a kid myself back then and I didn’t have the wisdom or maturity necessary to help him in getting past his behavioral tendencies. This kid was far from being a bully; he was instead an annoying provocateur.

In a poetic sense, that kid was similar to the body pains that I feel daily now. The pain fluctuates between my jaw, hips, thigh, knee, shin, hand, and wrist. Those are the regular spots. There are a few other places in my body that hurt from time to time, but the ones mentioned are consistent. The problem isn’t that I suffer from severe pain at all. I did for a few months after the motorcycle accident, and I guess that those days could be considered as bullying on the part of my body. The difference now is that I experience pain to a comparatively much smaller degree, but I do feel it to some extent all day. Imagine someone forcefully flicking at your earlobe with their finger from the time that you awake in the morning until the time that you fall asleep at night. The pain from that wouldn’t be debilitating, but after several hours it would be annoying enough for you to lash out in wrath against the person doing it. That’s what my daily pain is like, and I’m really getting tired of it. It’s going on 4 ½ years, and it’s just getting old. In the end it remains a battle of mind over matter.