Pains

I’m lucky to have such smart, intense and interesting friends. This weekend my good buddy D, who seems to be in a much more positive, open-minded, less judgmental mindset than he has been in the past, came up to Boston and we hung out, hat some beers and talked on Friday night, and then after I recovered from it on Saturday morning (the dry air dehydrated me even more, and an over-long walk in the cold definitely did nothing to strengthen my immune system) I hug out with my old friend K and her husband J. I love those guys, but I worry about them.
K has an illness that she can live with, although she is often in some pain, but which is very unpredictable. She felt great for weeks, but then last weekend she had a painful coughing fit that sent her to the emergency room. J is struggling to deal with his own feelings about it, his own worry and his natural sense of…dislocation? Having no choice but to give up some of himself for his wife. It seems like people who have a loved on who is sick, frequently feel some resentment towards the sick person for saddling them with their problems. How could you not begrudge the fact that someone else’ being sick is interfering with your life? And yet, the guilt over resenting someone for being sick, which is obviously not her fault, causes a sort of anxiety feedback loop that is unhealthy. Not admitting your anger only makes it fester inside you as the overwhelming evidence of it continually stops you from being able to deny it’s existence to yourself. I think men have a particular difficulty with this, because we naturally react with a form of aggression when something difficult happens, but our culture spends so much time teaching us that we can’t take out our anger on other people, especially women, but it does nothing to teach us what to do with it, how to alleviate it, it only narrows its eyes and minimizes its importance, its relevance and reality. Society always demands that men accept their emotions, but constantly minimizes the relevance of them by belittling them.