Little Delia felt her sinewy body to be pulling itself apart in all directions. She felt dull terror at the complexity of forces, each tendon and muscle and fiber working in contradiction which ideally results in equilibrium but really resulted rather in simple pain, at work in her small frame. Lower back pain was constant, extreme tightness in her legs, nauseating contractions in her neck, spasms in the micromuscles of her face. The most practical and obvious mental mechanism for dealing with this was bodily disassociation, resulting in the frequent sensation that she was in fact a tiny little soldier sitting in a cockpit located between her yellowgreen eyes (eyes coloured like a pasture of wheatgrass at that kingly hour of sunset when a primordial green suddenly washes over the earth), overworked and unpaid, attempting to manage a ridiculous and comical array of flashing red lights and awful warning sounds coming from the enourmous sentinel, also called her body, which she was attempting to control. We're all familiar with the phenomena of accidentally becoming aware of the mechanism of breathing, whereby one suddenly must steadily inflate and deflate their lungs until they forget that they must breath, thereby breathing naturally. Delia rarely forgot. She was always out of breath simply from the exhaustion consciouslly having to manage what ought to be autonomous. If she did not consciouslly flex the wall of her abdomen and the long vertical pillars of her thoracolumbar in order to support the weight of her upper body, they would not do so and the base of her spine would be left to hold her torso upright, resulting in the constant pain in the small of her back, and the awful sensation that she would one day, tragic and pathetic, break in half backwards. 
               One side effect of disassociation from her body was a ridiculous clumsiness. Seemingly every time she held an object she'd forget it was in her hand and spill or drop it in some way. The fact of the laziness of her muscular system meant she was rather dystrophied, and therefore very bony. Combine this with clumsiness, and Delia was constantly struck and abused by the external world, nearly always impact on a section of bone which was protected by perhaps half a centimeter of flesh. Delia did not have a high pain threshold, on the contrary every minor collision felt as if she had been hit with a bat. She was, however, so accustomed to physical pain and extreme discomfort that she relied heavily on the mental trick of the soldier in the cockpit to deal with the electric data of pain. If she successfully engaged her dissociative mental trick, she did not feel pain; pain was just the nervous data which drowned out all others.
               The buddha Gotama's discovery was the inevitability and inescapability of suffering; that it is in fact the fundamental nature of self-consciousness. Much of the work of one's spiritual practice on Earth is to ain constant awareness of this, such that one never attempts to escape suffering by means of sensual pleasures, for desire causes craving, and craving causes misery. Delia's great gift (incidentally givento  her by the Moon when, on the night of her conception, Delia's mother looked out through the the slit between the curtains of the window and felt a dull and subliminal horror at the unsightly shape of the Moon in labour, when that elder goddess is in the ghastly pains of coming to wholeness but is yet like an ugly half formed grape, and was shocked to see, as sometimes happens at the earliest morning hours, that the Moon was of a shape and angle which Mary O'Connor had never seen in her life: it appeared to be upside down), which in this early era of her adulthoood was little more than an embarrasing tumor, was that she had known this ancient fact of existence from the youngest ages she could remember. Even before puberty, before the pains began that went to to the pit of her stomach, she was always uncomfortable. Having always known that life would be painful from start to finish Delia was able to naturally accept, like a dog, moments of basic calmness or even emptiness as unbelievable gifts bestowed upon her by the old Druid gods. Of course this was her imagination, for those gods thought as much of Delia O'Connor as they did the crusading Saxon armies of the 5th century, which is to say aware but uncaring, but nonetheless Delia was never more happy than when the magnetic waters of life reached an ebb, when the wind stopped and by the laws of thermodynamics her manic energy was absorbed in the stillness around her and she was able to relax. 
               In other words Delia did not expect to be happy , but she did believe that a day would come, if she played her Cards just right, when the angels both above and below would take her across, to the next world, and her Earthly flesh would dissolve, would evaporate into the ether and she would live as spirit until the day of Judgement. She believed this not as a fantasy but as a literal fact, and her faith that she would one day be released was the only thing at all which kept her from violent suicide. She knew, of course, that if her god would do this for her, her god being a jealous god, Little Delia would have to do something equally inhuman for It.