Simply, I would say pain. I have wanted to write about the role that chronic pain has played in my life for a long time now, and how it affects my actions day to day. At first I wanted to talk about why pain stops me from being able to do things, but in reality I am recovering and my life no longer functions that way. Key phrase there: functioning.
My life in recovery is focused on functioning as if I had no symptoms telling me to do otherwise. In pain? Go to school anyway. Feeling nauseous? Exercise anyway. And one of the ways I can function despite having pain is not acknowledging it, as if it isn’t important. This is the reason why writing this essay has been a challenge for me, because I thought I would have to address the symptoms I experience in it. I actually tried to sit down and write the essay from that perspective, and the reasons for why I am told not to focus on pain became abundantly clear when I faced heightened pain for the rest of the day. Then I realized, I don’t have to talk about what my symptoms are or how they affect me to be able to talk about my life in recovery.
Recently my life looks a lot like it did before I developed any pain, but what drives my actions throughout the day is decidedly different. I must make the choice everyday to function as normally as possible, which of course wasn’t something that I had ever thought about before. It’s a strange way of living, where the outcome is pretty much the same but the effort and thought I put into my actions is completely different.
Of course, I can’t claim the outcomes are identical no matter how much I wish they were. For example, I never used to be able to take naps during the day, nor had the urge to. Now I have to make the active choice to not take a nap, because that would not be functioning normally and instead giving in to symptoms. However, I can’t claim that I am always successful and I certainly take more naps now than I ever did before.
Another example is eating. A process that used to be so thoughtless for me is now perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of my day. To function normally, I must eat normally. I have to make a difficult decision every day to eat, made worse by the fact that I am often not reminded to by normal sensations like hunger, because they have been hijacked by pain.
It might seem kind of crazy to function through the symptoms the way I am, and it seemed counterintuitive to me at first too. I used to desperately wish that doctors would just give me medication to take the pain away, and felt hopeless when they couldn’t. But the thing is, chronic pain feeds off of its validation, so the more my life was driven by symptoms the worse they became. Functioning despite pain is the only way to continue to invalidate those sensations, and teach my mind that pain signals are neither necessary nor helpful.
And the truth is, this approach has been working. It’s an arduous process, but following the plan to function has made tangible changes in my life already. In the spring I was able to return to some normal activities like dance for the first time. I was able to pull out my feeding tube in the summer, and even return to in person school this fall, something I had never thought possible a year ago. So for now, I will continue to focus on functioning every day and continue to see my life return to normal along the way.
This was a very powerful essay, and even though I can't directly empathize with it, you do a great job of describing what you go through and why it matters to you. I especially liked the paragraph about eating; it it gives a sense of how simple life experiences have changed for you. This made the well-written conclusion all the more satisfying for me.
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