Last week, two very unrelated people stopped and asked me why I chase pain.

I stopped and thought about this for a bit, then came to the conclusion that pain is something I feel comfortable with. You get used to being hurt, you expect getting hurt, so you hurt yourself before others can hurt you.

Logicalish? On an emotional survival level yes. It's control. It's not as bad because you are doing it on your own.

So I settled on that conclusion.

A few days passed.

Friday came, and I wanted to wait out the Friday-night-in-LA traffic, so I decided to go see a movie. Checked out the various theaters around, then came back to An Education. Wasn't really sure what it was about, but I kept hearing wonderful reviews.

So I opened the synopsis to see it was about a younger woman, heading for college, seduced by an older man. Criminal type.

My heart stuttered.

Was this me? Would this cause me pain? Did I really want to do this?

I deliberated for a few hours, while winding things down at the office, before deciding that I probably would. Drove to the theater, just a few miles from the office, and as I was parking, my anxiety reaching a mild pitch, I thought to myself:

Why am I anxious?
I am afraid.
What am I afraid of?
The emotions that this movie could invoke in me. What it could make me feel.

I turned off the engine and got out of the car.

The emotions that I have, the regret, the longing, the feelings of fear that I may never meet another man as wellmatched for me as he was, that incredible fear that he, he was it. That I would spend the rest of my life wondering. That the female lead in the movie, in the end, might choose the man over her boring life, and live happily ever after, and that it would make me cry. Again.

Things that make me (or have made me) cry, on an entertainment level:
-The ending of Swing Kids
-When Mufasa dies in The Lion King
-Two particular scenes in the musical: Wicked
-The Disney version of Old Yeller
-The end of Sweet November
-Batteries Not Included, when the little one dies
-The acoustic version of Stabbing Westward's Waking Up Beside You
-Rawl's novel, Where the Red Fern Grows

I cry like a little bitch. Totally do.

Anyhow, that was a massive derailing.

I was afraid of the movie, I was afraid of the ending.
I've been hesistating going up to certain areas of Hollywood because I don't want to deal with the memories.

It hurts.

But I realized it was fear, fear of emotion, fear of pain.

Pain happens. None of us dodge it.

And those emotions, the ones I'm so good at supressing, are still there. They will still come out, when stimulated, no matter what I do, no matter how much I convince myself that it was for the best, or that he wasn't that great, or just to forget the way he made me feel.

It reminded me of why I chase pain.

Because life hurts.

Because I've been plagued with anxiety my entire life and I've let it impact me so much, so damn much. Which means any new situation, any new place, is going to trigger a mild to major flight-or-fight response in me.

And it is my job to recognize it, to not run, but to encounter and address.

And it is my job to determine whether a situation is truly hazardous, or if it is simply the anxiety triggering the adrenaline.

My body, my chemicals, fight me living the life I want.

So I know that things will hurt me. I know I will step into situations where I cannot tell if my instincts are speaking to me or just another imbalance. And I'm going to do it anyway.

Because I have to learn. Because I have to know how to survive. Because things are going to hurt unless I burrow up in my room, and even then loneliness can find me.

I live and chase pain, I chase awkward, I chase my anxieties down streets until I find them and dispell them or trip and crash into the pavement.

That's what I have to do.

Otherwise, I wouldn't do anything.