Handling Pain

Pain is that ill-advised trip to the pee at 2am. Just as you’re about to make a left turn to the bathroom, you stub your toe against a sharp edge of the bed. Suddenly the sleepiness vanishes from your eyes, you’re in excruciating pain. You open your mouth to scream but only air comes out. And when it finally comes, the scream sounds like it was embellished with auto-tune. T-pain.

Your folks ever disciplined you so much, you start to suspect you’re adopted? Talking about, “there’s no way they’ll treat their biological kid like this.” So you pack your bags in the middle of the night, with a plan to leave at first light the following morning. The next day you realize you left out a few small details. Where the hell are you even going to stay? More importantly, what will you eat? Will you run on oxygen? There’s no life hack for this, go back to your room and sleep!

Advice to the mandem, crying is therapeutic. When something hurts you, don’t indulge society and say “I will be a man, I won’t cry!”. For the love of God, find an empty room and go cry your eyes out. What do you think is the reason grandpa has since left but grandma has been alive since independence? Crying man, c-r-y-i-n-g. These women have held the secret to longevity all these years, right under our noses. But not anymore.

Drink. And by drink, I mean, drink water. You can distract the pain by going to pee every thirty seconds. Keeps your mind preoccupied. Or better yet, you can pretend the pain doesn’t even exist. For a moment just imagine one of your legs gets completely hacked off.

Where are you going to feel the pain?

“In your leg”

But the leg isn’t there?

“See”

Listen to music. One thing about music is, when it hits you, you feel no pain. Preferably from the heavy metal genre. You barely hear a thing as it’s so chaotic. But it best describes how you feel at that moment, so you’re in perfect sync. Do not, I repeat, do not listen to any music from Lana del Rey or Billie Eilish when you’re hurting. We’re not quite ready to eat jollof rice at your funeral.

Take it out on your younger siblings. Used to work for my brother 😂. All though, to be completely honest, I probably deserved every single one of those love punches. Seriously though, find a nonviolent means for relieving the pain; Like eating lots of food. There is no downside, you can finally get fat, get rid of all the left over’s, and now have the rare privilege of a credit balance reading in binary.

Away from the banter. The first step to dealing with pain is acceptance. The second step is, sharing, and the last step is moving on, which is the hardest part, experts say. For me though, the only way to handle pain is to know pain and be a pain…

in someone else’s arse.