Sometimes it takes me years to put a phrase together. This one is suddenly popping up from years ago when coffee enemas were suddenly all the thing. As a super spoonie, my point of view is being a barium enema in a world full of coffee enemas.
No idea why in the world that popped into my head *now*, but I do remember the day I first heard about coffee enemas. I'd just been through one of my most horrible ER visits ever because the pain was so bad that I couldn't stop crying out like you sometimes hear in a nursing home, and even now I'm nowhere near nursing home age.
The pain was bone pain. There's no way to medicate for bone pain except with heavy narcotics, and they have to be very cautious with those during some kinds of testing. The test itself was also one of the most painful I'd ever been through, barring spinal taps. If you've never had a spinal tap (sans radiology or numbing meds, and throw in a student) and you think kidney stones suck, you have a real surprise coming.
Anyway, I went in for one symptom and wound up with a very different one springing up from simply lying in one position too long on a very uncomfortable table (6 hours is way too long when bone pain says howdy), and I was having to walk nearly naked in a little gown to a public bathroom after a barium enema and it was all I could do to hug the wall and walk, and how I even made it to the bathroom like that is beyond me.
I know this is gross content, but since my childhood got a jump start with a barium enema and one of my worst pain memories as an adult is tied to one, it really surprised me to see a whole health movement joyfully jump on coffee enemas. Like, is your life not miserable enough that you need to do something weird to yourself?
There are two kinds of existence in this world- inflicted and inflicting. You are either inflicted and miserable, or you are inflicting and creating misery. You might even be the sort that mobius strips that back into inflicting misery that you create back onto yourself. There are all kinds of self harm.
Some people are born to be miserable. They have genetic variants that assure this. They live in environments or families that support this. They never asked for it, and they would do nearly anything to escape it if they could. For some people, these are lifelong and what I call 'slow terminals'. They fight to live even in horrible pain.
Some people are born feeling fairly decent and run around doing and living and being without a thought until something in their world comes crashing down. They have good genetics and live in homes where they at least feel safe and live in environments that aren't constantly threatening their health and safety in some way. They didn't ask for this, but when they think about it they feel unhappy. They feel emotionally stressed and not good enough and belittled somehow. They sometimes start looking for ways to stress out even more and they call it stress relief. They harm themselves with drugs, starvation, cutting, risk taking, and more. These people seem to miss having physical challenges like survival against the odds thrust upon them, so they create them.
Imagine those two groups of people being able to switch places.
