My Pain and Me: Life in the Shadows

This morning, I lay in pain, listening to the birds as they sang their dawn chorus. I watched as the sun climbed above the horizon, clasping my abdomen as each wave of pain washed through me. Nothing could distract me from the burning agony centered above my left hip, no matter what I tried.

And I’m not sure what surprises me more: the fact I can’t distract myself after so many years of practice or the fact I still expect to after almost a decade of failure. The pain comes, it rages, and then it leaves me. I never know when it will return. It could be later today, tomorrow, or next week. It may stay away for a month or more — I can never know.

Once it’s died down, I shower and put on some makeup. I go about my business, pop to the shops, fill my car with fuel, and come home for my breakfast. But all the time, I am pretending. I smile at people and wish them a lovely day. My husband asks me if I’m okay, and I smile and nod. But it’s all an act.

I feel like a shadow, a faint reminder of who I was before the pain.

In the clutches of a pain flare, my life shifts into this deception. All I can do is make people around me believe everything is okay, but in reality, it isn’t okay at all. I am crushed by the weight of disappointment that I haven’t been able to get better, lose the shackles of the pain that debilitates me. How can I be okay?

And yet, somewhere deep in the recesses of my broken mind, I recognize a flicker. I know the pain will end. It will go; it will release me again. I know I have worked hard over the last 9 years to learn about myself and understand what hurts so badly within me that my mind creates physical pain to protect me from it. I know who I am now, better than I ever did before.

As little as two years ago, I was in pain for hours and hours of the day, every day. I had maybe 30 pain-free days in a year. I was lost in the depths of misery and blackness and couldn’t see a way out. I almost stopped looking for one. I needed help, and I had to learn the hard way that the only person who could help me was me.

So yes, I woke up in pain this morning, yesterday morning, and several days before that. But I also had weeks of pain freedom before this.

Weeks, not hours. Weeks not days.

I am healing. I am moving from shadow to presence, I am beginning to see myself again sometimes. In flashes. I’m still in here, screaming for a chance to exist in the full richness of life.

I will be well again. This pain will pass.