Wimps
Bunch of wimps*.
I am not going to be "feeling better" in the way you mean. I live with pain, the accumulation of injuries, and high sensitivity. I need to be able to report it here, because it's not just for you. I can track my progress, on a searchable medium. It's not the whole of my life, but it is a side of it, often what I cannot express elsewhere. I hide the pain from cow-orkers and friends, only when it interferes with plans do I reveal it as the real reason I have to stop. Can't be coy about it, but I don't want to seem a whiner. Work has been hard, the fall cranked it up a notch. Finally called the company for more electrodes, and I'm on the stim again. Doing what I gotta do.
So, if you really want to offer words that DO help, something more like, be courageous, tough it out, suck it up, don't forget to do your exercises, or best yet, leave a joke. Distraction helps, sympathy really doesn't. It's not a cold, not a temporary state, this I deal with every day, and will for the foreseeable future.
We are not taught the sorts of reactions in response to pain, grief, loss. Most of us flounder, wanting to help, but not knowing what to say. Perhaps because I went to so many funerals as a child, I thought about this deeply. The loss of a child, a parent, a spouse, is an untouchable pain. That person is barely there, and only the presence of friends and family, is of any, however faint. help. A hug, a murmured "sorry" is all that might get through. Easier if the deceased is elderly, ready to go, family more prepared. Stories about the one lost, the kind of laughter that heals and reconnects us to the living. Tears flowing together, and laughter bubbling out.
Much the same, as I have often found with patients with long term disease, is to ask about anything but what fills their current thoughts.
So, when the suffering is chronic, most of us are way past the hugs 'n sorry phase, we need the jokes, the rope to pull us on and the reminders to keep pulling.
I challenge you, then, to practice here. When I report set backs and of days that ache, be creative, not sympathetic. I need this space to be able to honestly bitch about this, so as not to dump on a few people in person here all the time. This is where I store my whines, but that is always the least important part of the writing here. Like those little mood emoticons on Livejournal.
*That's a joke.
I am not going to be "feeling better" in the way you mean. I live with pain, the accumulation of injuries, and high sensitivity. I need to be able to report it here, because it's not just for you. I can track my progress, on a searchable medium. It's not the whole of my life, but it is a side of it, often what I cannot express elsewhere. I hide the pain from cow-orkers and friends, only when it interferes with plans do I reveal it as the real reason I have to stop. Can't be coy about it, but I don't want to seem a whiner. Work has been hard, the fall cranked it up a notch. Finally called the company for more electrodes, and I'm on the stim again. Doing what I gotta do.
So, if you really want to offer words that DO help, something more like, be courageous, tough it out, suck it up, don't forget to do your exercises, or best yet, leave a joke. Distraction helps, sympathy really doesn't. It's not a cold, not a temporary state, this I deal with every day, and will for the foreseeable future.
We are not taught the sorts of reactions in response to pain, grief, loss. Most of us flounder, wanting to help, but not knowing what to say. Perhaps because I went to so many funerals as a child, I thought about this deeply. The loss of a child, a parent, a spouse, is an untouchable pain. That person is barely there, and only the presence of friends and family, is of any, however faint. help. A hug, a murmured "sorry" is all that might get through. Easier if the deceased is elderly, ready to go, family more prepared. Stories about the one lost, the kind of laughter that heals and reconnects us to the living. Tears flowing together, and laughter bubbling out.
Much the same, as I have often found with patients with long term disease, is to ask about anything but what fills their current thoughts.
So, when the suffering is chronic, most of us are way past the hugs 'n sorry phase, we need the jokes, the rope to pull us on and the reminders to keep pulling.
I challenge you, then, to practice here. When I report set backs and of days that ache, be creative, not sympathetic. I need this space to be able to honestly bitch about this, so as not to dump on a few people in person here all the time. This is where I store my whines, but that is always the least important part of the writing here. Like those little mood emoticons on Livejournal.
*That's a joke.
Labels: pain
Posted by Zhoen on Saturday, April 03, 2010
4 comments:
Yes, "good advice" is often far short of the mark. But I am prepared to accept it, as one accepts gifts one knows will never be used, if I know it comes with warmth and genuine good intention. Then it is the gesture that I accept, not the advice.
People do not know what to say about illness or pain that does not go away, that is part of one's life. The "hope you get better" thing is perhaps an expression of helplessness in the face of it. Strangely enough, there is a comment I sometimes get from someone: "Be well" - and I find I rather like that, because I take it as meaning "well" in the largest possible sense of the word, referring to the kind of "wellness" of soul that one can be forcefully tuned into even in the midst of pain and physical illness. But also, I suppose, I have got to know this particular commenter well and sense she is coming from a good place.
Warm greetings to you this Easter Saturday.
Blessings be, wherever from you choose.
From a fellow chronic creaker
RtheS,
The gesture is appreciated, of course. With good friends, I take the time to suggest ways that will actually help, which a good friend will always want.
Be well, yes, I like that one too. I can do well, when all else fails.
Pesach, peace.
Hi Zhoen
I agree, all our uncertainties come up and out when it comes to pain - our own and that of others'. Despite the inevitability of pain (when we meet it early in life, we're largely unaware of how long and awkward our dance with it will be?), we are not taught how to be around it and with it; we just do what we can to learn the steps as we go along. ANd then, just as we get used to one set of steps, the music changes!
This morning you left a comment on my blog (thank you) - 'A place to come ashore, a place to land...' Sometimes I wonder if pain has a similar effect and whether it both washes us up and becomes a place we can launch forth from? All I know is that it's one of the most insistent and confounding of things to live inside or alongside.
I am, to be sure, one of the world's slow grievers and hopeless at jokes but your heading *bunch of wimps had me smiling! It made me want to shake your hand - and my own, for that matter.
As RTS says - be well.
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