Living with chronic pain is debilitating, to say the very least. It is all-pervasive and makes it’s way into every aspect of your life. It consumes every action, emotion and engulfs every facet of your life. It’s like a cloud of helplessness, distraction and self-doubt.
For many people, it begins with a simple, rather inconsequential disease or injury – which, through either misdiagnosis, negligence or some other reason, turns into a lifetime of hell. The pain turns into a ‘disease’ and continues even after the injury is healed.
It is a demon that strikes unexpectedly and ends up crippling you. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t always make you stronger. At times, it ends up crippling you. You hold yourself back, tell yourself you aren’t capable, give in to the notion that the less you do, the more comfortable you will be. It makes you believe that sleeping 20 hours a day is better than being awake and that doing nothing is safer than anything else.
It creeps on you like a leech, sucking the blood and eventually the life out of you. It lives off your fears and feeds on your confidence, self-esteem and sense of self-worth until there is very little left. It convinces you that your options are limited.
At first, it hurts you. Then it makes you angry at yourself. After a while, it makes you mad at everyone else. You learn to be selfish, self-centred – your only concern being yourself and the alleviation of pain. You will be irritable and short-tempered. You will drive away friends and the people you love and care for. You will destroy relationships and build grudges and grievances.
Those who understand will accept your circumstances, but very few do, and why should they? You are no longer a joy to have as a company, but rather a tedious piece of furniture – to be tiptoed and pussyfooted around. You slowly stop being included, not because they are bad people, but because, in your all-consuming endeavour to preserve yourself – you have become one.
You spend all your time and energy trying to mask it, your efforts fuelled by bravado and the desire to be self-sufficient, not be pitied and to be seen as “whole”. So much goes into it that the energies that should be spent on just being a person are deflected and repurposed and subsequently consumed.
Sometimes you can’t mask it. A lot of the time, you can’t hide it. Over time the people around you believe your pain is exaggerated. That you do it for attention. That you amplify it, they begin to think that you aren’t getting better fast enough, or that your pain isn’t as bad as you make it out to seem. You are making a fuss. You are weak. You use it as an excuse to be a bad or awkward person.
It is either that or they, without ill-intention, attempt to take away your independence entirely. It isn’t their fault, very often your pain isn’t tangible; it isn’t visible, it cannot be seen.
Your successes will be limited because you limit yourself. You tell yourself constantly that you can’t. You deprive yourself of opportunities because you believe yourself to be incapable. “What if…” becomes a notion you begin to live by. You label yourself a failure, even if no one else does.
You find yourself in conversations that consist of very little more than your condition – and these will happen more and more until it becomes the only thing people want to know about you. The truckload may collect unsolicited advice and recommendations of “alternative medicine”, yoga and various healers.
It becomes you. You become it.
Your understanding of yourself and your condition does not lead to a fairy tale; uplifting, movie-styled motivation to “beat the odds..” it leads to a grave, uncontrollable, almost unbeatable depression. The feeling of having to wake up in the morning, shake off your painkiller induced stupor and face another day of manoeuvring around all the many boundaries, obstacles and limitations you have set for yourself is too much to deal with. So you take a few more pills and continue as though that stupor never wore off. You hope it never will. But it does.
As doctors shootaround in the dark, take shots in the night and run you through a series of tests after tests, you do your homework. You self medicate. You find one of those delightful drugs or perhaps a cocktail of a few that helps just a little bit and shove them down your throat until you are so resistant you find yourself needing six times the adult dose (and far beyond the recommended maximum) until you decide to move on to something stronger.
The prescriptions? They are what led you to this. The doctors said they weren’t addictive. They either lied or misjudged your ability to self regulate.
When you finally manage to stand and look in the mirror each day, you see a shell of the person you once were. Older, weaker and less accomplished than you once saw yourself as being. Then you pull yourself together, have a coffee and meet the day, or what’s left of it with a fake smile on your face, disillusion in your heart, disappointment in your mind and caution in your eyes. You know the day will amount to nothing because your only fight will be with yourself. But you fight anyway – because what else is there to do?
You strive to do what little you can, with what little you have, but intermittent pauses shatter every inch of progress in your stride because you have been rendered disabled for a week straight. You can’t hold down a job; you can’t go to work, you can’t run a business.
But you do. You get up, and you do because that is the only way to beat it. Yes, you will be slower than everyone else because you can put in fewer hours. Yes, you will be dependent, but a crutch is better than a grave. Yes, you will be limited, but it is better than not being at all.
You can still do great things; it will just take longer, be harder, be more dangerous and more painful than it is for everyone else. Yes, your path is different, but it is your path and no one else’s. Yes, your failures will outnumber your successes, but only because you believe that to be true.
Persevere, and everything you see for yourself will come to fruition. Do not bank on the efforts of other people or fall into the trap of dependence or the need for support.
You are capable, just in a different way. Your own unique way!