Secrets of the Injury Pile

Part II of a series

when reality can fuck off

I said in the first instalment of this series that the point of The Injury Pile is to deny our own pain.

To explain what I mean, I want to start with a little thought experiment. We can use one of the examples I mentioned in the first instalment: not getting a second interview for a job you really wanted.

Let’s say that it was great job for you, and you also thought the first interview went really well. You started to feel excited. You started to believe you could have something you really wanted.

And then…radio silence. No second interview. No job. Nada.

Now imagine that you are going to text your friend/partner/sibling/whoever and tell them what’s happened. There are two texts you can send.

The first one says, I didn’t get that job. I really tried, because I really wanted it.

The second one says, I didn’t get the job. I never get what I want.

Take a moment to pay real attention to how these two statements feel. Can you perceive the different ways each of them lands for you?

For me, the first one brings a sinking sensation in my chest and a prickling in my eyes, like I might cry. The pain of the situation seems to be registering in my body. This makes sense, because the first message is full of naked disappointment, sadness and even despair. It’s about wanting and not having, trying and not succeeding. When I read it, I’m right there in the middle of those feelings.

The second one shows up in an entirely different way. It feels clenched and stony, like I’m walling myself into a fortress. As soon as I read I never get what I want, I can feel myself shifting from sadness and disappointment into this other, clamped down, almost aggressive feeling. My jaw tightens, my chest feels stiff and locked down. The sadness is now walled off, on the outside of the fortress.

I never get what I want is basically an entire Injury Pile summed up in one sentence. But why shouldn’t presenting a more intense form of the crappiness bring increased sadness, disappointment, despair? Why exactly does the Pile generate that clenched, fortress-type feeling instead?

It happens because there is an underlying message to I never get what I want and every other Injury Pile, whether it is summarized or enumerated.

And the message is something like this: This is not a normal, acceptable or fair amount of shittiness for one person to have to bear.

That is the point of the size of the Pile, of the absoluteness of Never-Get-What-I-Want–type declarations. We’re trying to demonstrate how undeniably not OK it is that we have been landed with this amount of crap.

Which means that I never get what I want is not actually a statement of sadness or despair.

It’s a declaration that things should not be this way. It’s an argument that reality itself is treating us unfairly.

This the secret alchemy of the Injury Pile. It turns something that we wish hadn’t happened into something that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

And in the process, it coverts our original emotions of sadness or disappointment or whatever into a different set of feelings—ones that come with thinking we’ve been particularly deprived or singled out for ill-treatment. Feelings like unfairness and resentment.

These other feelings aren’t pleasant, but our brains are willing to accept them for one important reason: they are the price we pay for denying the reality of the event. As long as we keep insisting that whatever it is shouldn’t have happened, we never really have to feel the painful truth that it has.

Basically, this is the mental equivalent of standing at the airline desk arguing for 20 minutes that your flight left before the scheduled time—because the moment you stop arguing you’ll have to face the fact that, fair or not, the fucking plane is gone.

And we don’t want to have missed the flight. Or to have failed to get the job. Or to be forced to feel sad and disappointed and despairing again. We don’t want to accept the reality of the pain.

So we stack up the Injury Pile, and we present it to anyone who will listen. We take refuge in our stony fortress of refusal. We put our pain on pause by insisting that it just shouldn’t be this way. Because it’s not right, it’s not OK, and haven’t we already done and felt and lost and suffered enough?

Maybe if we just keep on arguing, they’ll turn the plane around in the end.

Except, of course, they won’t. And if we don’t stop postponing our own pain—if we don’t dismantle this stony wall of refusal—we’ll never get wherever it was we were trying to go in the first place.

In the next instalment of this series, I’ll share how I got out from under my own Injury Pile and how you can do the same.