Living With Chronic Pain

When ‘fine’ becomes relative

Category: The Body

This booklet is for people who hurt. Every day. All the time. People whose pain doesn’t go away. Doesn’t get better. Doesn’t respond to treatment. People who’ve learned to live with pain as a constant companion. An unwanted companion. A relentless companion.

How It Started

An injury maybe. An accident. A surgery. Something specific. Something you can point to. Or it started slowly. Gradually. Insidiously. A little pain. Then more pain. Then constant pain. You don’t know when it started exactly. You don’t know what caused it. Just pain. Increasing pain. Unexplained pain.

The New Normal

You’ve learned to function through pain. To work through pain. To smile through pain. To exist through pain. You’ve learned that ‘fine’ doesn’t mean what it used to mean. ’Fine’ means you’re upright. You’re functioning. You’re surviving. ‘Fine’ is relative now. Recalibrated. Redefined.

The Exhaustion

You’re exhausted. From the pain. From managing the pain. From explaining the pain. From pretending you’re not in pain. From fighting for treatment. From fighting for belief. From fighting your own body. The exhaustion is profound. Constant. Invisible.

The Grief

You’re grieving. The body you had. The life you had. The future you expected. The activities you loved. The person you were. You’re grieving while living. While functioning. While pretending you’re okay. The grief is complicated. Ongoing. Disenfranchised.

Good Company

The Pain Chronicles — Melanie Thernstrom, 2010
Thernstrom is a journalist who has lived with chronic pain since her twenties. She wrote a book that is both history and confession, tracing pain from medieval theology to modern neuroscience while standing inside it the whole time. She takes seriously the loneliness of hurting in a body that looks fine. The gap between what pain is and what medicine can see. It’s meticulous, personal, and it does the rarest thing a book about pain can do, it believes you.
Cake — Daniel Barnz, 2014
Jennifer Aniston plays a woman in chronic pain who has stopped performing recovery for anyone. She’s lost friends, routines, her marriage, her ability to sit in a car without lying flat. She’s difficult. She’s angry. She’s exhausting. Barnz made a film that refuses to redeem her pain or wrap it in inspiration. It just shows what it’s like, the logistics, the isolation, the grief, without flinching or asking her to smile. The most honest portrait of living with a body that won’t stop hurting.
i,i — Bon Iver, 2019
Justin Vernon’s fourth album sounds like a body trying to hold itself together. Layers of sound fracture and reassemble. Vocals drift in and out of clarity. Nothing stays fixed. The whole record hums with the effort of continuing, not triumphantly, not dramatically, just persistently. It’s the sound of someone who has learned to build something beautiful from a state of permanent incompleteness. Not healed. Not broken. Just still here, still making, still going.