Pain: Surrendering to Trust.

Pain.
We all have to face it at some point.
Yet we run from it.
Hide from it.
Cover it up.
Try to numb it.
Fight it.
Cry at the unfairness
Of something that is part of
Living.
Being alive.
If only we could hold it
As it is.
Close to us.
Cradling it in loving arms
Asking what it needs.
Really needs.
What might it say to you? 

Pain and Fatigue have trapped me inside of my life and body for nearly 4 years. If I were really being honest about it, I might even say that pain - and the fear of being in pain - has dictated the large majority of my life in one way or another.

To begin with, it was the avoidance of pain, fuelled by the stories I grew up surrounded by. They told of other peoples experiences of pain, and the ‘right’ way of dealing with it, which usually included pushing it away, medicating it, ignoring it and above all, keeping it to yourself. For many years, I compared all the physical pain I suffered with, to that of my Mothers experience of pain caused by Multiple Sclerosis - or at least my perception of her experience of it. It feels silly to even write it now, but the truth is that I compared every type of pain I experienced in my own life, to how very contained she kept herself and her own pain. She will be sad to read this, I’m sure, but there are many layers that aren’t shared with us as children, and lots of nuances in myself that I didn’t understand until I was into my 30’s.

I’ve recently discovered that I’m autistic, which begins to explain some of my sensory experience of life. It has always been full of uncomfortable and painful sensations that the rest of the world seemed to be completely oblivious to, but took an absurd amount of energy to cope with in my own life. There were many moments where I was convinced that some evil witch had cursed me before birth, because why else would there be so much suffering and yuck inside of myself? My Mum and Brother’s illnesses only backed up my imagination more - maybe my whole family was cursed? Of course, if that were the reality, then there would also be a cure-all magic wand that could be waved, and all would finally be well. No more pain for any of us!

Pain is something we all avoid

Let’s be honest here. Pain is something we all avoid as much as we can, and if you go searching for it, then you’ve either got some fetish going on, or need a good course of therapy (neither of which make you a bad person, but you can see how all those stories about pain build up to make it feel like a big bad monster). I’ve grown up learning that pain and discomfort are things to avoid at all costs; a symptom to treat, usually with painkillers. Even the word “painkillers” promotes the total obliteration of pain. But that’s not possible, is it?

People end up drinking themselves into early graves and taking all sorts of drugs in a desperate attempt to escape the inescapable, and some people feel they can’t cope at all with the excruciating existence of being human - can you blame them? We pump ourselves full of medication, and forget that’s not the only thing we have to do. Who told us not to listen to ourselves? When did we decide to hand the responsibility of our wellbeing to someone who doesn’t actually give a fuck? At what point did we all get put into the same small box, full of side effects, trapping us into a continual cycle of pain: Fearing Pain. Expecting Pain. Experiencing Pain. Rinse and repeat.

Pain comes for us all, in some form or another, and I don’t believe it’s something that we should be so afraid of - in fact, by being so afraid we end up making the whole experience so much worse. By surrendering to the reality of that feeling - however much you can truly say a feeling is real - then we learn to work with it and not against it.

Surrender doesn’t mean giving up

Surrender doesn’t mean giving up, it means accepting that this is a part of our existence on this planet. It’s just another colour of the rainbow. Another taste. Another touch. Not everything is pleasant and flowery and fucking fabulous, and that’s okay. I truly think life would be mind-numbingly boring if we were all prancing about grinning like mad people all the time, and I don’t believe we’d ever step into our own truths if that happened either. Where’s the fun in everything and everyone being the same?

I have been in pain for a long time, and although I have only had a diagnosis - a REASON for the pain - for just under 4 years, I have been in pain much longer. I have felt tortured by all the different types of pain; mental, physical, emotional, even spiritual! Just when you think you’ve experienced it all, suddenly you realise “fuck, I didn’t know that bit could hurt like that.” And in that moment you fight it, because it’s not fair! Why should I have to deal with this? Why am I being punished? And maybe that’s some of why we fear pain so much, because on the surface it can feel like a punishment, a scolding for being bad and getting things wrong. Something that has been inflicted on us by someone, or something, else. It is taken out of our control. And while most pain is acute and will fade relatively quickly, other pain endures, and for some, it gets worse and worse until the end. The possibility of some of those realities is hard to swallow. We can cope with knowing that we might stub our toe sometimes, and we can even just about cope with having our hearts broken once or twice, but a pain that stays and grows is a big fat NOPE. How can we possibly allow that existence to be within us? Well, we don’t really have a choice.

When pain lasts for more than 3 months, we call it chronic pain, and instead of it being something that can be fixed or taken away it settles down within us for the long ride, and it changes us. I think pain of all types have the ability to change us, but there’s something destructively infectious about a sensation that is with us every single moment of every single day - it eats into every part of our lives. It is very easy for it to become everything, and then we begin to identify it as being part of who we are. The lines blur between me, and me in pain. They tell us to not let our conditions define us, but they don’t ever tell us how to do that. There seems to be no real understanding of how blinding and all-consuming it can be, when it is part of your reality.

It is really unpleasant to have to be honest, and say that there is no magic formula for living a life that contains joy and pain in the same breath. The more time I spend diving into personal development, the more I realise that it starts with learning to be our own friend. But even then, there is a level of over-simplification that can ignore the journey that we have to go on internally to meet ourselves, and then externally when we reintroduce ourselves to the world.

My relationship with pain changed when I learned to trust myself

My relationship with pain changed when I learned to trust myself - really trust myself. That only came about because I realised that the only person who understood exactly what I was experiencing, was myself, and if ‘we’ were going to get through this shit in relatively one piece, then we needed to have each others backs. Re-discovering journaling (thank you, Susannah Conway - big sis ♥) has helped me immensely in forging a relationship with myself, and dissecting the bits which feel authentically me, instead of all the rubbish from elsewhere that’s collected in the crevices over time. It helped me to identify what was my pain, and to really start listening into what that pain was saying. I intuitively began to move my body, as I had done as a child sitting on my bedroom floor with my eyes closed to the world, surrendering to the music. I finally starting hearing my body telling me what I needed. I knew that it still held me and carried me through life with the same strength and determination that had always been there, but also with a lightness and ease that I’d not been aware of before. All the work I’d been doing on myself felt like it was paying off - I was finally getting it!

And then I got ill. It wasn’t even a long illness, and I’m still not 100% sure what caused it or what it was all about, but it was probably the worst I’ve ever felt. I was in bed for 2 days, feeling quite delirious, and I’ll admit there were a few moments that I thought I might be dying, and wondering when the right time might be to tell someone. My body didn’t feel like it belonged to me anymore, and I was acutely aware of being separate from it, and yet fully drowning in the excruciating variety of sensations. I was panicking. How would I know if I needed medical assistance? When was the right time to ask for help? Could I even actually articulate out loud what was wrong anyway? How could I possibly get through this? What if it didn’t go away?

Surrender.

The word appeared in my head and wouldn’t leave. In that moment I knew that the only option I had was to surrender to this feeling and experience, and trust in it. I knew that my body wanted to be alive, and that meant I needed to trust that it knew what it needed, and all I had to do was listen and let it get on with it. That was the moment everything changed for me. What a fucking revelation it was to realise all I had to do was soften and surrender, and let things happen as they were supposed to (and what an utter piss-take to realise this simple thing that takes so fucking long to figure out ourselves, but that has to happen that way, no matter how many spiritual gurus and other experts tell us that this is the truth of it all - *shakes fist at the sky*).

I wish I could tell you that it was my magic wand moment, that banished pain from my life forever, but it wouldn’t be true, and I’m leaning towards not wanting that kind of life for anyone - though that’s a whole other puddle to paddle in. The truth is, I’m still in pain. I still experience many different facets of pain, but instead of fighting against it, I choose to welcome it with open arms. Sometimes I don’t do a very good job, and sometimes I still find myself tensing up and preparing for the worst. I’m only human. But I’m intentionally choosing to love the painful bits of this existence, as well as the prancing, grinning times. And it is true, that you can’t fully experience the full spectrum of life, without embracing the shadows and what might lurk in them.

I will always be grateful for the life that has shaped me; to the words that flow freely, and the ones that get caught in my throat; to each breath that holds both joy and pain within it, and to the unbearably exquisite existence of being alive.