The Psychic Pain Scale

Ally Brosh’s pain scale is perhaps one of the best ones I have ever seen; it certainly makes me laugh, which has definitely been proven to help. It occurred to me, however, that while we’re pretty good at talking about physical pain, psychic pain is not something anyone talks much about, at least in the same context.

If I break my foot I wear a cast. I hobble around and people get up to let me sit down, carry my groceries and hold doors open. If I am pale and tell you my stomach hurts, you will either offer me food or not, depending on what might help me feel better.

What would you say, however, if I wore my psychic pain scale number on my face?

I have a pretty simple existence here, and I did that on purpose. The sort of digging I’m doing into my beliefs, ideas and life takes up a lot of energy and a lot of time, and though I can see the micro steps making monumental differences, I know that many people don’t see much more than a 30-something without a car working part time and hanging out watching the World Cup at the local bar.

“What have you possibly got to worry about?” someone asked me the other day.

“I’m surprised. You should be further along than still believing that shit,” someone else said.

“There’s always something you have to go through. You can’t just run away every time something comes up,” someone said when I moved to Panama.

Would they have said the same thing if I were lying in a hospital bed, recovering from a broken back? Would someone who came to visit have said, “Gee Morgan, I thought you’d be walking by now. You should be further along than this.”? Would anyone be giving it a second thought if I had cancer and were sitting in a rehab facility, taking it easy, eating healthy food, working part time or going to physical therapy to strengthen the muscles that had gone weak around the bone that broke?

What have I got to worry about? Well, you just don’t know, do you? Because we are a society that does not talk about its psychic pain, its symptoms are harder to spot and talking about how you’re really feeling isn’t actually ok. If I don’t tell you the exact nature of my pain, it can’t really be that bad, can it? If I can't tell you I shattered a femur; that I'm on mountains of pain killers; if I am not pale, limping; if I am able to eat and enjoy some time out with friends, does that mean I don’t have anything to worry about? You wish. We all wish. We all act like that’s true. We’re all in motherfucking denial that this very real yet invisible thing exists: that it has weight, body and gloms onto the soul.

Like physical pain, psychic pain can come in waves, and it’s easy to forget when the pain ebbs. For a little while, there’s a profound feeling of NOT being in pain, then it quickly fades into normality until the psychic pain ratchets itself up again. That means I – thankfully – have minutes, hours and days where I can focus on the beauty of life around me. Those moments buoy me when the other moments feel dark, when I am confused because the pain I’m feeling cannot be ascribed to a certain part of my body and will not be soothed by ice packs or heating pads, ibuprofen or casts.

What does help is pressure: a good strong hug; the weight of the sun on my back; cold water and gravity pushing against my skin; the edge of the paper against my fingers when I turn the page of a good book; and laughter pressing into my ears, especially when it’s my own.

You can’t ever know, invisible audience. And they don’t have to tell you. But the next time someone says something about how tired they are, how sick they feel for no reason, how they’re going through something tough, maybe just reach out and take their hand. Because the words weren’t created for describing this sort of pain, and the culture wasn’t either, but the pressure of human touch can transcend all that. Maybe, just maybe, it will lessen the pain somewhat, without any need to know its cause.

Love and psychic kisses

Morgan 

The Shame of Pain

I’ve written about something similar before, but it’s coming up again because, well, I’m in pain again. My friend Molly Steere wrote a blog about this not too long ago, asking people to give people with chronic pain a break, and when I read it, I thought “Yeah, give us a break!”
Molly and I are very similar people, and in this case I totally empathize and agree with one huge hurdle in both our lives: we are held back from what we want to do and accomplish by chronic and often agonizing pain.
Molly has it much worse than I do when it comes to the extent and depth of pain she endures, but I have the luck of having much more varied pain sources: if it’s not one thing, it’s another. My problem is that I am somehow ashamed of my pain and will rarely admit to it because it shows that I am not the super human I want people to think I am.
Take this very moment. Before I left Mexico I got some sort of stomach ailment, which is not the normal Mexican stomach ailment: it is an overall inflammation and tenderness in my abdomen, made worse by eating pretty much anything, but it is always there to some degree. Considering that preparing and eating food is one of the reasons I get up in the morning, both to make money and to enjoy my day, this is psychologically one of the worst things I could be asked to endure.
When I tell people about it, as with every other illness I’ve ever had, I try to end the sentence on a positive note: “Yes, I feel like crap, and I can’t eat and nothing sounds good, but they should be able to get my lab results back soon and I’ll feel better then.” In fact, the other night I was telling someone that I was actually feeling worse, and ended the sentence with, “but that’s okay.”
“No, it’s NOT okay,” said my dad, who was in the room, and obviously as frustrated as I was that I wasn’t getting better.
And he’s right. It’s not okay, but that’s what I always say. When I think about why I actually say this when I don’t mean it, I have to think about why exactly I do so. One of the reasons is that I am ashamed to admit that I am any less than okay: 100% normal like everyone else. I am ashamed to admit that, despite the fact that I take very good care of myself, I am constantly sick. I am ashamed to admit that something in my life is out of my control, and I try to take control of it again by sounding upbeat so that others won’t feel sorry for me.
This is stupid.
This is stupid because you cannot actually expect people to give you a break if you don’t ask for one. You cannot get angry at someone for expecting a normal response from you if you don’t feel normal but you don’t tell them. You can’t expect someone to understand why you aren’t as happy or upbeat as usual if you don’t tell them why, and no one will offer to help you if they don’t know you need help.
I tend to work myself too hard anyway. I am constantly expecting more from myself than other expect of me, and apparently part of that is expecting perfect health despite this internal pressure. Sometimes, before I can catch myself, I find myself thinking, “No one else seems to suffer from all this stuff, so I shouldn’t either.” Well, not everyone else is me. Regardless of how I want to feel, I need to act like how I actually feel, if for no better reason than to allow myself to rest when I need to. The world will not fall down if I’m not there to shore it up, so why do I keep trying to take all the weight on my shoulders?

Love and painful kisses
Morgan