A Year of Daily Pain

The past year has been painful. Gutting. Grief-stricken. The consistent heartache has been enough to drive a person into a melancholic spiral of despair. Sometimes we fell. Most of the time we got back up again, even if it felt more like crawling, dragging, rolling.

I had a new kind of pain enter my life, one that many are familiar with, but many more are not at all. Another layer of consistent aches known as…

CHRONIC PAIN

After The Great Hammer to Head Concussion of 2019, I’ve become intimately linked with the experience of chronic pain. Once something I knew other people experienced, the plague took hold of my spinal muscles, nestling itself between my shoulder blades and around my neck. Chronic pain was something I knew about, certainly, from friends and clients and strangers. The actual experience of it opened my eyes, aggravated my nervous system, changed my relationship to my body and altogether reshaped my practice.

Here’s the thing. Before all this, after decades of anxiety, I had managed to relax, to trust, to be fully embodied, meaning I lived fairly comfortably in this meat suit. I had managed to fall deeply in love with my body. To enjoy living in it in a way that I had never imagined was possible. I had healed my body image issues, my obsessive relationship with food, I stopped dieting and learned how to eat things my body actually likes instead of following cravings that made me feel like garbage. I wasn’t perfect. It’s easy to look back and think all my problems started after the concussion, but that’s not true. But it certainly blew the lid off of everything that I was coasting on.

The thing about chronic pain is its not day 1 that gets to you. It’s a bummer, but compared to my period cramps, it’s a walk in the park.

The thing is that over time it’s exhausting. It’s isolating. It’s discouraging. Feeling that spike of inflammation activating my nerve endings drives me to foam roll and stretch. Sometimes it helps but often it doesn’t. The constant ache drives my to cram ibuprofen in my mouth. Sometimes it helps, but often it doesn’t. 

It forces me to stop and evaluate my bandwidth instead of go go going when I want to. It forces a new kind of discipline and a new relationship to movement. I haven’t had the same urges to move freely because I want to. Instead I make myself move in specific ways because I know it will bring at least a little relief. It’s a different way to live in this body, and one I’m still getting used to.

That isn’t always the case though. Some days are different. It’s hard to plan what days I’ll have the energy to zoom through my to do list, and what days I’ll have to take it slow. That’s required more patience and kindness. That’s been fucking hard.

There are days that start off good and turn bad. There are days that start bad and end up worse. If I have physical therapy sometimes a bad day might get better. It’s an expensive habit, but it fucking helps.

The worst part, however, is explaining it to the people in your life who don’t understand. I already feel frustrated with myself. Having to justify why this ongoing physical experience is affecting me emotionally is a kind of inner Olympics I don’t enjoy. However, like this whole process, I’ve learned a lot about the voices in my head I had shut up for awhile. I guess they deserve to be heard, too.

I wonder about people dealing with this for longer than I. I think about their resilience. I think about what their dark spirals look like. I wonder if they have people to catch them when they slip. I do, thankfully, even if he doesn’t always get it. If you are one of those people and I can think of a handful I know personally, I am in awe of your strength and your willingness to still show up fully in your life, pain and all.

I reflect on the road I’ve traveled, and that even though my mind likes to tell me I have fallen backwards, it can’t possibly be true. The reality is my body image and food stuff is still fine. I have lost and gained weight throughout this process and while there are time I prefer my body in some ways to others, it has more to do with how much energy I have and how strong I feel over how I look. I fall into depressive state way less frequently. I am still learning and growing in all areas of my life. This set back has sucked, but it has brought with it opportunities to take stock, reevaluate and change.

I think about the road ahead and some days, I really do feel optimistic. Maybe this won’t last forever, but maybe it will last longer than I would have liked. All I can control is the attention I pay to my body, the acts of kindness I make time for, the pleasure I create amidst the pain. Luckily, I am big enough to hold both.