Torture

I wonder how will I react under torture. Doubt I'm good martyr material. Always been scared of pain, big or small. I've heard of people being tortured for many reasons; most people break, while some emerge stronger. Guess I just don't have it in me at all. And that's why I always have this paranoid fear of getting hurt. So tangible it is that I render myself useless before I can take action. Sometimes the thought of getting cut is more painful that the cut itself. Remember what they said about burn victims feeling less pain during treatment when their minds are distracted elsewhere. Remember it was a VR experiment where researchers strapped HMDs to victims showing ice/water imagery while their burn wounds are being treated. Reduces the pain by 30-40% if I'm not mistaken. Pretty interesting how your body betrays you sometimes.

Phillip Yancey mentioned that leprosy is not a disease where your limbs fall off (Dr. Paul Brand's "The Gift of Pain"). Accurately, it should be a disease that disables your pain nerves. Leprosy patients will be incapable of feeling any discomfort even if they happen to rest their arm on a scalding kettle or stick their fingers into a blender. A small pebble in a shoe can be overlooked as a patient puts it on daily, continuously chafing his toes raw to the point where it breaks into a festering wound that makes the rotting toe fall off. So pain is a blessing when seen in this light, a way our bodies communicates with us to tell us that something is not quite right and ought to be rectified. I guess this is the same with emotional anguish. Source of the problem might in internal or external, but internal problems can only be solved by internal means. I don't believe there is any ointment or medication that can truly make a person happy and content.

But external means can distract one from his or her problems. Like the PS2 I bought. I don't really need it, you know. Don't even have the time to really sit down and complete a game. But it sure as hell silences the hollering issues in my mind. But these things usually manifest itself as an addiction that numbs, while not really solving the problem itself. So, for a short period of time, like 1-2 hours a day, my mind's focused on how to get Tidus to learn that Overdrive, instead of the stuff I should be taking care of. A waste of time, yes, but still...