Tim Slee's Blog: How's the Serenity? - Posts Tagged "tim-slee"

All of my earlier experimental work has had one consistent thread running through it - not consciously, but as it emerged, I found I couldn't ignore it. And it came out again in Tom Murray.

PAIN.

Physical, emotional. How we experience it. How it effects and shapes us. What it takes to help us through it. I had an earlier manuscript win a US Publishers Weekly fiction prize, and the central figure in that sci-fi novel was a young man who had been emotionally 'cauterised' - had his ability to feel emotion cut off as punishment for a crime. I wrote a three book crime/thriller series about a woman who had been abused by her father. I wrote a historical adventure about a Viking woman who turned the pain of public humiliation into a badge of honor.

In Tom Murray, the narrator is a child who, because of a medical condition, analgesia, can literally not feel physical pain. Can't sweat, can't cry. And if you can't show you are in pain, whether physical or emotional, how do you deal with it? The narrator deals with this one way, his twin sister in a very different way.

Where does this consistent interest in the theme of pain come from?

Actually I didn't need to delve deep into my pysche to understand it. The answer is in an x-ray I have in a box in my basement.

In 1991 I was at a party in Kings Cross. It was a lovely summer night, so I was sitting in a window sill. It was a couple of floors up and I was drinking margaritas. Unfortunately, I made an unplanned exit from the party, backwards, out of that window. An awning below saved me from landing directly face first on the bitumen below, but I exploded my left ankle and broke my left leg, nose and a wrist. I lived.

The doctors at St Vincents in Sydney did a fantastic job putting my ankle and leg back together but it the cartilage was so badly damaged, that the ankle joint is basically just bone grinding on bone.

So pain has been a constant companion for the last couple of decades. I chew painkillers like candy and on the worst days I either use a stick or walk as little as possible.

But the pain has taught me a lot, that I think also applies to emotional pain but I'm willing to be corrected on this. It's always there, and always will be, but I try not to think about it and there are entire days when I don't. Life goes on around it.

I want understanding, like when I'm with someone and they want to run for a bus or from the rain, and I can't. When I can spend one day digging dirt in the garden, but not two.

On the bad days, I get out my stick not only for the support, but also to flag to the world around me - guy in pain here. Give me a freaking break today, world.

But I don't want sympathy. On bad days when I'm using my stick, well meaning people have held doors for me and that's nice. But at a theatre production, an usher pulled me out of a queue, checked my ticket and told me there was an elevator for people with disabilities. I thanked him, took the elevator up, then went to a bathroom and cried.

Pain is what I have, not who I am.

But my pain is nothing compared to what other people have, and I can understand how it can consume you. Drive you to drink, to depression, to suicide. And the only way I know to deal with it (apart from the meds), is to share it. Share it, don't hide it, so that others can help you through it.

I'm able to pull out my stick and show the world my pain. I know there are a million kinds of pain where that isn't possible - there is no stick, no badge, no red flashing light for most people showing the world how they feel.

Which takes us back to Tom Murray. Kids in pain who can't show the world how they're feeling. A community that piles around them and tries to help them through it, even though they really can't. And the bond of a brother and sister - of family - that is the real answer.