From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
I was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view.
I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.