a gift.

I read and study and repeatedly come across the notion that "pain is a gift". A humbling arrow shot through the heart. A teacher of patience, and that time can be endless or nothing at all, merely an idea we choose to embrace and measure our days by.

Pain is a lot of things until it is not. 

Until your pain races through your body, finding no walls or barriers, permitted to cycle around and around, agony at full gallop. Until you are out of mind and patience and the meaning of these words, and even words themselves, lose their coherency, disassembled into letters and the shapes of letters, like Scrabble pieces. 

You become merely a body, a pitiful vessel, with a perfect and intact soul that you cannot remember owning and therefore does you no good in that moment. Pain ensures that you will cry out for God, and that you won't be able to remember or grasp why you are calling upon Him, and what such action is supposed to invoke. 

You cease simply being in pain. You become pain. 

Here is what I know:

I am 27 years old and have been battling my own body for 11 years. 

I have undergone 3 major procedures and a handful of minor ones, in the hopes of becoming healthy.

The procedures aren't working in the long run.

I am weary. I feel that I have been alive forever, yet ironically have missed out on so many of the experiences that many people consider to be "living".

I have no idea if I'll ever be able to work.

Somewhere, on this vast earth, with its forests and skyscrapers and wheat fields and city parks and schools and castles and oceans, somewhere there has to be someone who can fix me.