On pain and identity

The thing is, I have migraines. Not the occasional, “I have to go home from work early and lie in a dark room” kind of migraines, but chronic daily unrelenting migraines. My stitch-n-bitch pal Mel once announced to the knitting circle, “I’ve had a headache since 1990.” I didn’t even miss a beat in my stitching and just nodded matter of factly. That’s how you know a fellow migraneur –they don’t even try with the solutions. They just nod and move on, nod and move on. That’s what you have to do when you are sick, when you are nearly always in pain.

I have had this condition for roughly four years now, and the longer I live with it the more I come to uncover the complexity of it. Chronic pain is infinitely layered, and labyrinthine. Chronic pain demands attentions, lots of attention, and it takes over a much larger piece of your life’s pie chart than you want it to. If you let it, pain will eat the whole pie, become your entire identity. When I think of who “I” am, I come up with a short list: Writer. Artist. Mother. Community Builder. Chronic Pain Suffer. I try to keep the pain towards the end of my list of identifiers. But on days like today, when the barometric pressure shifts and I watch the 24hours of relief I’ve recently experienced lapse with the incoming clouds, it threatens to become THE defining part of me.

I don’t want to write too much about pain, or give it too big of a voice in my life. It’s a drag. Plus, how many people want to read that your head hurts everyday? I don’t even want to read about that everyday, and I’m the one I’m writing about. Still, I recognize that there are a lot of us out there – especially women—who suffer from physical conditions the medical industry cannot or will not treat. Fibromialgia. Endometriosis. Chronic Fatigue. Hormonal Depression. It’s actually quite a political issue, which I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that we shouldn’t not write about it either. I don’t want to remain silent about my condition, writing only about sparkly things and tripping through daisies ever so la-la-la when really, pain lurks. So both “me’s” find a voice here: the suffering nearly 40 year-old woman who mourns her youth as it fades rapidly with every attack; and the hopeful 30something girl still looking forward with hope and imagination at what is yet to come.
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More on life, pain, and sparkly things coming soon….