by Susanne Gross
Dedicated to my close friend and confidant Barbara Stammer

Since childhood I have been plagued by the gift of growing pains. Whenever I physically overexerted myself, as evening would fall, the slow and creeping growing pains would wake and spread like warm fire throughout my legs and rest in the space between my mid thigh and mid calf. Its low and achy throb would center itself in my knees, radiate outward and force me to lie still until it passed on through and decided to go away. Since I was easily tired out, I remember many nights of crying myself into a semi-unconscious sleep. Why would this agony ever be considered a gift? My mom made up the phrase "growing pains" because she said they came when I pushed myself beyond what my body was ready to handle. That one day I would understand its purpose, respect it and consider it a friend. This ache and its almost unbearable pain tells me when my body, my mind, my self has had enough and lingers until I fully understand my limits. I never considered this pain to be a gift, let alone a life saver, until I started getting growing pains in my heart and I realized that I would die if I didn't start to live.

When I moved to Austin, quite by accident four years ago, life's realities were not my own. I had no idea what being a human being meant, what it would entail, take from me and give back, what it would demand of me and how it would force me to change as I grew into my adult skin. They (whoever "they" are) say that people die many deaths before they pass from this life. I've lived a life full of gifts and fortune, but I no longer feel the same carefree joy that allowed me to live freely without always thinking and considering. I've been told that I've seen and experienced too much to live in that blissful ignorance any longer. That it's really a blessing in disguise because now I have the ability, the choice to develop a truer, more real freedom that can never be taken away or grown out of.

More and more life seems like a two-sided coin to me. No action without reaction, the dark night of the soul, the delicate balance between free will and faith. When life and responsibility of living became real to me, I tried and succeeded for a long time in lulling myself to sleep mentally and emotionally because it frightened me to death. The heartache, the pain of being a human being and being alive in the world seemed too much for me to bear, too much for anyone to have to face. I built a cocoon carefully constructed with thoughtlessness, careless action, stagnant emotion, distance and alienation from everyone and I fed myself lots and lots and lots of pot to numb this constant restless, unnerving and unnameable desire that lived with me day and night. Put a whole new spin on Lady Day's "Good Morning Heartache" for me.

In retrospect, I guess I took on a whole lot more than I could handle all at once when I moved out on my own. It wasn't that I had too much to do or too many responsibilities. It was more that I became overloaded because I never let anything out. Thoughts swirled around in my head, emotions filled my heart and demanded an outlet that I would not provide. But life, human nature or whatever has a way of bringing a person full circle so they can come out the other side of their soul, or not. The other side of that damn coin. My growing pains moved from my legs to my heart and caused me so much pain, anguish and anxiety. It stayed there radiating its fiery throb, true heartburn, and forced me to chose between life and death but required me to move from and heal the cesspool of my soul.

I met this guy, Jeff Kolinsky, in Colorado while I was traveling around the US who was and is dying of a type of genetic cancer. His father, brother and sister all have it and his mother has had to watch the entire family she helped to create die and leave her. Jeff has had tumors removed from a dozen places on his body, including his brain, and he has one-third of one kidney left to keep him alive. On top of this, he has to live with the knowledge that his life is being cut short and that he can die almost at any time. Still he hikes, plays, goes out on the town and lives his life to the absolute fullest. When I met him, I felt so ashamed of the way I had been taking life for granted. What a great mental kick in the ass to get it going on. So I did.

Anais Nin wrote, "...and the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." When you live in a self sustaining cocoon not only does it become harder to break out of it as time goes on, but the emotional interest goes up incrementally as well, pay back for existing and not living. Once you do crack the surface, breathe the fresh air into your mental lungs, and get through the initial freakiness of seeing life from different perspective, pay back is a piece of cake. It becomes impossible not to live, feel and enjoy life with this incredible sense of freedom from any type of barrier. Wake up to anything that will help you make sense of the world and your part in it. Put whip cream on it and eat life by the handful. Love it and make it your own.