Oh boy, here’s a tough one.
I’m not even sure where to begin.
When chronic pain takes over your life, you have to say goodbye to a lot
of things you once loved. Dancing, art,
working out, running, it’s different things for everyone. You also have to say goodbye to a lot of
things you never even thought about, like being able to wash your hair AND
style it within the same 24 hours, or load up the dishwasher then vacuum while
it’s running. You have to chose which
you want to do, because they all hurt so much that you can’t get them all done
in the same time frame as you used to.
You end up too worn out from one to do the other. You start clinging to anything familiar,
things you used to love, some amount of “normalcy” for you. After a while, change in general and having
to let go of things for other reasons can seem like a painful reminder of the
life you once had, the life you expected to have, and how this is not it at
all. Break ups hurt more, whether romantic
or with a friend or relative. Moving is
harder, not just because of the physical pain that comes with moving, but because
you can’t help but think about where you had planned on being in your life vs.
where you are going now. Finishing
school, switching jobs, making new plans for the future as the world changes
around you, it becomes a new kind of hard.
Change can be difficult for everyone, but when you live with chronic
pain, it can be utterly depressing. I
recently finished college, and I am working on getting a new job. I had a whole list of things I wanted to be
when I grew up. I was a pretty
reasonable child, so most of the things on that list were perfectly attainable
goals for a healthy person. Of course,
there were some not-so-likely things on there, too, but I have no way of
knowing what my chances would have been at this point. The whole list ended up being out of my
reach. Literally everything I wanted to
do with my life was physically involved.
I can’t do any of it. I had to
make a new list. I had to come up with
things that I would be able to tolerate doing and try to convince myself that these
jobs are something I WANT. It’s
not. I keep telling people I’m working
on getting my “dream job” but what I mean is it’s my dream job out of the
things that I’m capable of, and that’s going to have to be enough. This is what graduating college and looking
for a better job has made me feel. This
is what this new, wonderful life experience is to me. This job IS something that I really want in my
life right now, and I’m thrilled that it might work out, but as well as being
thrilled, I’m also reminded of everything I wanted to do but can’t do,
everything I thought I might be doing with my life now but I’m not. It’s hard, it’s conflicting. I’ve always been someone who thrived on
change, but when every change seems to lead to something less enjoyable, after
a while, change starts feeling like the enemy.
You cling to what you know, even if it’s killing you, because you’re afraid
that if you let go and let yourself move on, you’ll only end up in worse and
worse positions in life. Chronic pain is
sneaky like that. It becomes too painful
to do something, you are forced to stop, but you think it’s just a break. You don’t know it’s forever until years have
gone by and you realize you can’t get back.
The important thing, though, is that you keep moving forward. Maybe you’ll go up, and maybe you’ll go down,
but life is basically a train on a track behind you, coming at you at top
speed, and if you don’t move forward it will destroy you. Moving on with chronic pain, from anything,
is hard and confusing and painful, but if you aren’t willing to risk it getting
worse then you can never expect it to get better.
