Painkiller | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Painkiller | Previous Challenge Entry
By Linda Lawrence
04/08/20
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I have a friend whose mind is trapped in a noisy dark place. Childhood memories of being labeled stupid, ugly, worthless are the ground floor of her prison. Abuse and self-loathing led her to do dangerous things that resulted in a pregnancy she thought would give her a baby. Someone to love her, at last—but the baby was snatched from her and put up for adoption. Her body and soul still cry out for that baby. She conceived another baby. He, too, was taken away. The walls of her mental prison echo with the cries from her empty womb. Those children are in their late thirties, somewhere, and the dissonance of the unfairness has never been resolved for her. Everything is off-key. And the rapping in her head is a driving tempo that gives her no rest.

She spends hours each week going through books at the library collecting names for babies, writing the names on scraps of paper to add to the piles of hoarded goods in her apartment, trying to fill the emptiness in her life. She wanders through thrift stores, bringing home every doll and stuffed animal she finds.

Call her Bambi—the name she told me she would like to have, to match the life she wished she had. That was the day I discovered her dream to sing on television. But—I’ve heard her sing.

The first time was when I took her on a day trip to her hometown. It was while swinging high into the air on the school grounds she burst out singing—“I’m at the top of the world.“ She asked me to video her so she could be seen on television. I laughed, thinking she was kidding but she was dead serious. She let down her limp Pippi Longstocking ponytails and struck an awkward, exaggerated “Ta-da!” pose. This was an unusual happy day for her.

Most days she’s caught in repeat mode. Painful memories, rehearsing over and over the unfairness of life, hating her identity with labels of “mental illness” and “developmentally disabled”. She is angry at God for giving other people children and a husband—but not her! My attempts to share God’s love for her only make her groan with frustration. She writhes in pain of loneliness; all the while seeming to reject the only consolation I know to offer.

But I discovered there is a painkiller that gives her some relief, for a short time—for the duration of a song.

Knowing she loves to sing, I pulled up a YouTube lyric video on my laptop for us to sing together. But she wanted to go solo. So I became her audience. She was thrilled to perform, to act out the words with embellished drama, to close her eyes, to be someone else. I saw her agitated countenance transformed. For the length of the song, in her eyes, she was beautiful and whole. Her face relaxed. The dissonance in her spirit seemed to resolve. It was as if the combination of limelight and melodic music gave her peace and rest. She was given a moment of pure joy, of freedom from consciousness of all her frailties and disappointments. For those few minutes, she was in tune with her Creator, tasting who she was created to be and who she will one day be.

I’m so thankful He has given her a love of music, with its gift of moments of reprieve—a taste of what it will be like to be free of these broken bodies and minds—and to be whole.

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