The Intensity of Pain

The prospect of writing a book on feeling pain, sharing pain & holding others pain too.

I have journaled for most of my life. What started in little kid notebooks with those precious locks and tiny keys, to password protected word documents, to myspace, to Wordpress, to Medium and now Substack, I’ve written hundreds of articles and blog posts capturing feelings, emotions, memories and moments.

In this season, I have felt the call of writing persistently and adamantly, and I’ve been trying to honor it in building in a routine writing practice, in participating in an online Writing Intensive Workshop with on of my favorite authors, Hannah Brencher, and in a graduate school class on the topic of creative writing within the field of Narrative Medicine.

I also feel adamant that it’s time to write a book.

A memoir with a message.

The title’s still in progress, but the outline makes me feel hope. That the things I’ve been forced to navigate not only can provide solace and validation to those walking similar paths, AND that it it can both teach and support their loved ones how to show up in the height of someone else’s grief, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Today, I’m walking that line.

I’m holding my own significant physical pain, anger, and frustration within my body, at my body, and at my current circumstances. I’ve asked a few people to sit here with me, even though I don’t want to talk about how much it all huts. I just don’t want to be alone. And simultaneously, I am trying my hardest to hold some grief for others - still trying to show up as the friend I currently or previously need/needed when or if their situation were mine.

It’s fragile, friends.

To be in agonizing physical pain, intense emotional pain, and to make space for other things - it’s one of the most tedious, difficult things to balance. And, it’s something I believe is a superpower that some possess more than others.

Yesterday I spent 5 hours arguing against myself, trying to talk myself out a gut decision I’d already made, in the hopes that I could wait, and make my pain palatable for the others.

Yesterday I realized that I still try to make myself & my pain smaller in order to keep the homeostasis in the environment around me.

I also learned that I still feel very much triggered when I feel unseen or unheard, especially when I’m alone in a medical exam room. It makes me question my instincts, it makes me worried my body is telling me lies, it brings back seven years of medical gaslighting and emotions deeper than the bottom of the ocean. It’s the unthinkable.

How do I re-establish a connection between my mind, body and spirit when they can’t even communicate on the daily?

These are the things I think about during the night when I can’t sleep. They’re the things that upset me the most when I’m overtired and hurting.

Before Ketamine, I spent every minute of every day struggling to keep my pain inside the walls of my body that I felt invisible. I felt like a statue stuck to the ground, as people milled around on either side of me, pretending they didn’t see me there, desperate, but a shell of my former self, no light in my eyes.

The last few months I’ve worked harder than ever in my life to identify all of these things about myself, and rewire the patterns in my brain in order to have differing responses to the same feelings, different ways to process and release trauma and tragedy and pain rather than swallow it down until it became all consuming.

This season, I’ve felt honest wins (!!!) I’ve felt moments of coming home to myself (or the place in which I need to rebuild the newest version of myself).

This week though, this abdominal pain that came out of nowhere and is seemingly invasive to medical professionals - it’s knocked me back down.

It’s pushed me back to the ground for a minute.

I’m professing I won’t get stuck here. I’ve worked too hard.

But this moment is a reminder on how I ever ended up here in the first place. It’s a reminder that on the never ending list of traumatic moments I’ve endured, the body keeps score. And that any one of those things can come back up again whenever it’s triggered.

I was reminded this morning that the goal is not to avoid the trigger. The goal is to know what to do with it when it arrives. To know how to feel it in real time, how to process it, and how to release it. That’s the goal. Thats the thing we’re all working towards.

So whatever the pain is, wherever it comes from, whether its physical, mental, emotional or psychological, there’s no doubling down and just pushing through it anymore. I hate that in this moment, and I know it’s the healthiest thing I’ve said in a long ass time.

Severing the connecting between my mind and my body won’t work. So, I’m here to keep working on how to reunite them. Ask them to put their differences aside. To work together just a little better than they are now.

And I’m saying please, don’t count me out as a friend to bring the hard things to, even though “I have a lot going on.” I have a sinking feeling that I’ll always have a lot going on, but I dont want that to preclude me from being a good friend, a good partner, a good parent, a good person. I want it to make me even better at it. At helping you to learn to sit beside the broken hearted. To make peace with the quiet when there’s nothing to say except to grab each others hands (even just proverbially.)

The book… it’s starting to shape.

I’d love to know a situation in which you needed or provided community or support in a time of grief, but felt uncomfortable or unfamiliar or shied away from it entirely because you just didn’t know what to do. I want to write about it. About all of it.