Embrace the pain
It’s 4:30 am
The alarm clock is ringing again. That specific fucking sound. The ringtone you hear in public that makes you snap your head back and reach into your pocket out of habit.
Everything hurts.
My back hurts. The two herniated discs at 19 healed but left a mark. Phantom nerve pain persists and haunts me sporadically during the year. Occasional electric shocks move down my nerves from my lower back to the top of my calf muscles. It’s been so long that when it happens, the pain no longer registers like it used to. The degeneration in the thoracic region of my spine leaves a dull ache that I cannot get rid of, no matter how many times I crack my back and roll it out on a foam roller. The way through the pain is more pain. It gets worse when I don’t work out. The pain from the gym stabilizes the never ending pain in my back.
My eyes are burning. The blue light from staring at my computer monitor at work feels like it is disintegrating my eyeballs. Like the cells are slowly being radiated, and dying a cancerous death. I can feel how red they are, like the bloodshot veins have a heartbeat of their own. My gums are bleeding, again. The nicotine pouches that lost their effects a long time ago have begun to cause the inevitable wear and tear nobody seems to consider when they start using these cursed pouches. It doesn’t matter. The smooth flavour of Coke slowly seeps into my mouth, accompanied by a painful burn I have come to enjoy. It gives me heartburn, especially when paired with this shitty black coffee that the office trailer provides, but it will do. My focus and execution are a requirement; the heartburn and bleeding gums are the price I will pay to keep the production high.
Deep breath in, deep breath out. Our civil subcontractor has fucked up for the fourth time in a row. Production is slow. We are behind. The schedule we originally pulled ahead multiple months is now trending back to baseline. Concrete and rebar are now being pushed in the wrong direction. Despite the fact that I do not operate the equipment, drill the holes, pour the concrete or move the dirt, I am still responsible. The trade off for any management position. My head hurts. I haven’t had a single sip of water today. I don’t have the time for anything that lacks the caffeine keeping me alive. We push onwards.
It’s cold outside. Very cold. The wind penetrates my winter coat and sinks into my layers. Canadian winters are unforgiving. The windchill eviscerates whatever winter protection I thought I could bring with me to the work area. The piling rig drills into the surface of the earth, one casing at a time. There is no time to take days off anymore. We must continue forward. My worn out workboots are barely held together, with insoles so broken they no longer provide support. There is nowhere to sit, nor would it be a good look for management to be sitting down, staring down an entire crew of men actually performing the work. I must ignore the pain creeping into my knees, through my hips and concentrating into a burning ball of electric pain between my shoulder blades. There is concrete to monitor. There is piling to monitor. The pain is irrelevant. The more you fight it, the worse it gets.
The new guy is green. Green as grass. He has never seen a construction drawing in his life. He has a good attitude, but this is more or less due to him not having his soul slowly crushed by impossible deadlines and room temperature IQ stakeholders that must be kept at bay and managed. It’s almost a childlike innocence. For now, he is shielded from the reality of the industry that is about to swallow him whole. There is a direct correlation between the sky high number of divorces and substance abuse in the construction industry. Here, correlation does equal causation to the keen observer who watches his peers crash, burn and struggle to survive. My body hurts. My head hurts. My soul hurts. But I must teach, and teach with patience. He is making slow progress, but will be useful over time. He doesn’t realize the tsunami of grunt work that is slowly creeping in his direction. I will keep his head above water for some time before letting go. He will either swim or drown. Once he begins to drown. I will pull him up. Over and over. Until he learns to swim or he wisely walks away from the endless black hole that is construction management.
Another meeting. These meetings are useless. They accomplish nothing. They only serve to feed the people the furthest removed from the actual work. It is another form of mental masturbation I despise with my entire soul. The pain of these meetings courses through my veins. I have so much to deliver in limited time, and that time gets eaten by hour long blocks that accomplish absolutely nothing. Microsoft Teams is a modernized version of digital torture. Whoever created it probably didn’t understand the degree of mental lacerations it would inflict on employees and companies forced to use it. I hear Teams notifications in my nightmares. I hear it walking down the street. I feel that distinct vibration in my pants pocket, even when my work phone isn’t there. My leg shakes. Not from anxiety, but as a way to calm myself down. These people are talking about useless nonsense. I should be in the field, or getting invoices processed and work plans drafted.
The day is over. Progress was made. Small steps. Baby steps. Probably baby steps backwards but something was done. The only thing to do is to make the shit list for the next day and dive into an email inbox of infinite demands. To a degree, this job involves babysitting consultants with no real world experience, and babysitting drug addicts with impressive criminal records. Engineers are simultaneously the smartest, and yet dumbest people you will encounter in your life. Painful to deal with, even if they mean well. I look at my superintendent. He looks at me. We repeat some jokes that would likely get us fired in an instant if we were in the corporate office. Dark, terrible humor is our only reprieve on days like these. I am his right hand, he is my mentor. Together we push forward into an abyss of madness, quality issues, budget restraints, incidents and a schedule being endlessly pushed to the right.
My boots come off. I sit at the desk in the office trailer. I stare at the computer blankly, visualizing my life somewhere farther south with a beach. My neck is stiff, my back is burning and my eyes are ready to bleed after too many hours spent staring at Excel spreadsheets, trying their best to organize chaos that can barely be tracked. I’ll have to work tomorrow. More unpaid work. I let the new guy know to go home, and to take the weekend off. It will be more efficient with just myself. I can tell he is soft and sheltered, but there is something there I can work with. It needs to be paced. No need to drown him just yet. I’ll take whatever support I can get.
It’s time to leave the office. The work day is over, but the day is not. I pack up things into my backpack, lock up my laptop and head out the door to the parking lot. I start my car. I am tired. I am in pain. But that does not matter. The universe does not care about your exhaustion. My bills don’t care about my pain. Money does not make itself. My body does not build itself. I must push onward. The roads are slippery, the snow is thick. I can barely see 5 cars ahead of me. The warm heat of my car is the only comfort I have felt all day. But it is deceptive. It begins to lull me to a sleepy state. I am driving with one eye open trying to stay awake. The coffee has long worn off. My nicotine tolerance is too high. I begin a battle with myself to stay awake while I drive. Hopefully I win.
I open the doors to the gym. There is nobody here but myself. I am not here to make friends, I am here to build my body, to a mentally ill degree. 20 years of work have blessed me with compounding gains and a physique that I am proud of. The dumbbell preacher curls hurt. They hurt bad. The tendonitis in my right arm is again flaring up. Multiple rounds of peptides and HGH have helped tremendously, but decades of abuse remain, as stubborn as I am. I must push through. It hurts, but I still enjoy it. As I move forward it gets worse. But I do not give up. I embrace the pain and keep moving.
The treadmill creeps up to incline 12. I set the speed for 3.7 miles per hour. As I begin to walk, I can feel my hip flexors tighten up. The back pain from before creeps back into my shoulder blades. It does not matter. I have signed an unwritten contract with myself. The contract states that I must push for a minimum of 35 minutes no matter how I feel. Pain and exhaustion are not exclusions. There are no exclusions. There never will be. My abs are already visible, but it does not matter. I must get leaner, by any means necessary. I am trapped in a sick game I love, fueled by pain I strangely enjoy. I zone out and snap out of it. The time has passed. My contractual agreement has been met. The treadmill stops. It’s time to go home.
I walk through the gym covered in sweat with a slight limp. My back is burning. My neck is burning. My eyes are burning. Everything hurts.
I start my car again. The heated seat brings minor relief to the physical pain. My mind wanders as I drive home. I begin to replay memories of friends who have long since died, and how I wound up here. Why are they gone, and why am I still alive? I will never know. Driving in silence is powerful.
I get home. Drop my bags. Hit the shower. My mind is cooked. My body is cooked. My soul feels cooked as well. But I have come a long way. I am not dead. I am not in jail. Against all odds I am still here. Previously, this feeling would have warranted copious amounts of cocaine and alcohol, followed by ketamine to make me comatose. That is no longer the case. I have been dead sober for a while. I have been embracing the pain. I have been making progress. My money is legitimate, and so am I. I no longer spread pain by dealing those substances.
I have lost a lot of people along the way. My marriage has disintegrated. I left her a long time ago. Many friends did not make it and are no longer alive, or they had to be left behind. You cannot save everyone. I never expected to live this long, but I am surviving.
Keep moving forward, and embrace the pain.