Monday, July 11, 2011

a day without pain

Excerpt from first session with therapist last week:

Me: I really don't like to talk about my feelings. In fact, in most relationships I have had, I have gone months before bringing up anything that is bothering me, and my boyfriend is shocked that anything is wrong to begin with. "You are so good at hiding it" they have always said.

Therapist: Well, if you are that good at it, it is going to be a test for me as a therapist. I am sure that some things will get by me. You will have to tell me if I miss something big.

Me: That is the whole problem, though. I bury things so deeply I don't even know what is making me upset. I talk myself out of whatever it is. Intellectualize my feelings. Then I am just left with the hurt, without the reason.

Coming out
I feel that writing anything that seriously explores my feelings or experiences that isn't a handwritten journal (with a lock and key and a Lisa Frank design on the cover) is not only difficult beyond all reason, but also a bit self-indulgent and whiney. Difficult because nothing I write seems original, everything seems trite and self-evident. When I pick apart the latest pop-culture phenomenon, or deprecate myself to hilarious results (as earlier blogs will illustrate), it is effortless. It is as if those thoughts were just bubbling at the top of my consciousness, and all I had to do was put them in a semi-coherent line. Also, with everything that is whined about on the internet, in the facebook culture of self-adverstisement, who needs more? However, I feel at this point in my life and personal journey of diagnosis, that this method of communication is the only way that I can express to my friends what I am really going through.

I am coming out. Not in the way that my former coworkers may have expected (Rollin and Patrick, I'm really sorry). I am coming out as a person who is in constant physical pain. Some have called in fibromyalgia, I am not sure what it is. But in the past few months, the spotty, extremely manageable pain has reached a point in which it is constantly in my body and on my mind.

People have made jokes about my laziness; my ability to sleep all day and supposed lack of desire to move whatsoever. I have laughed them off, shrugged them off. But let me paint a picture of a woman, who at the age of 21, exercised four hours a day. Appeared in plays. Had a gymnast's body and a cheerleader's attitude. Or even a woman who at 25 woke up an hour before work just to do ballet, walked to work, and then swam in the evening. Well, that woman was thrilled with every moment of physical activity her body would allow, addicted to it, even. And each time she felt enlivened by the cathartic movement of her body, movement that healed her troubled past, movement that represented hope for the future; each and every time she felt sage, she was quickly and violently met with the complete breakdown of her body: the ultimate betrayal.

And that is where I am right now. I miss that woman, that woman I was. But rather than desiring world-class ability in movement onstage as I once did as a 20 year old, or the creative spark that movement brought to my writing as a 25 year old, my goal is clear.

I just want that first day. I want that first day I wake up without pain. I want that day where I walk around, go about my day without noticing a knot in my hand that I can't rub out. I want that day in which I go to sleep because my body and brain is a normal level of tired, rather than that moment in which I finally make myself lay down, with the disappointment of what my body is capable of still buzzing in my head, my body aching beyond control, and the over the counter painkillers in arm's length. I don't even remember what it is like without the pain.

A day without pain is something the healthy among us take for granted; a given part of human existence. The trouble in their lives, or your lives, is real, but very different. Will I get into law school? Will she ever like me? Will I need to borrow money to make rent? Those types of problems I will face in their own time. But I am widdling down my life to something more manageable, as the great movie "Adaptation" describes. Just that first day, and I will go from there.

It is hard to describe to the average person what it is like to seriously dread getting groceries or doing laundry, not because of the tedious nature of those tasks, but for what it might do to your body. It is hard to describe getting so much joy out of dancing at a concert but knowing in the back of your mind what that could mean for the next day's mobility.

I am not equating my problems to the real horrors of the world. I am not asking for sympathy. I just am asking my friends for understanding, and making my goal visible to me and everyone who may care. I also want to begin to chronicle my struggle with this in some way, and maybe I one day I can compile a real resource for those suffering. But for now, once again, I just want that day.