no consolation

content warning: death, extreme pain, trauma, information hazard, cosmic horror, god. please don't feel the need to read this, but i had to write it. for a long time i held this unchallenged soft belief that there was a kind of off-switch for physical pain. i say soft belief in the sense that i held it, on some level, without either directly considering or explicitly asserting it. or even really knowing that i held it, i think. it was the kind of thought that crosses my mind from time-to-time, and i do not challenge it, because i can see that it is a worm box. i think it was a kind of intentional naivety. it is not that i thought pain doesn't exist - it clearly does. i have chronic back issues that cause all kinds of pathics of pain, and suffer worsening reynaud's. i have suffered acute insults. i have friends who suffer much worse chronic pain, and have suffered far worse acute injuries. but i think the belief, specifically, was that maybe, when you are experiencing the pain of…