My pain waltzed in to claim me when I was twenty-two and I felt a fateful twist behind my right knee, but it had eyed me in the years before. When I was sixteen I enjoyed my weekly singing lessons until the twenty-minute mark hit. At that point, I prayed to perfect “If I Loved You” as fast as I could so that I could leave the lesson a little early and relieve my leg from the pressure it felt due to holding me and my diaphragm up long enough for me to belt and coo. The melodies could be mastered but the pain was unruly. At age nineteen I remember the standing-room tickets I had to History Boys went from cheap blessing to curse as my leg began to shake until I had to spend the rest of the play crouching, British accents echoing from the stage but remaining faceless behind fancy Broadway chairs.
These little memories come back to you after so many doctors’ visits in which they pry for the “why,” attempting to pinpoint any moment that might serve as “the beginning.” Is all this from when I fell and twisted my ankle after nonsensically deciding to try to lose weight on the morning of prom by taking a quick run for the first time? Or when I was in stage-fighting class in acting school, and the teacher, in an attempt at gender equality, placed small girls with large men to engage in pretend sword-fights that quickly turned into slammed backs against not-soft-enough blue mats like we were mini-Mickey Rourkes from The Wrestler?
One doctor told me that the placement of my hipbones is a congenital issue and in that sense, birth is to blame. My pain, even if only lurking underneath before it came out and lamented overdramatically like the Phantom of the Opera, has been there since the moment I was born. Along with a ton of freckles, an Irish temper, a tendency toward depression, pineapple-shaped toenails, easily burnt skin, and an inability to adequately clean any room, I came out with pain.
So throughout my twenties, I’ve felt eighty. My tight-skinned forehead has told a story of me that belies the wrinkles of ache that live underneath my skin in tense muscles and creaky bones. I’ve missed most parties because by the end of a busy day my body is just too tired from pain for youthfulness. I’ve heard my twenty-seven year old self tell twenty-three year olds, “Ah. You’re so young…” like I was an old woman in a rocking chair on a porch. In fact, the only one who I feel understands me is my Grandma. Over the phone between Michigan and New York we swap complaints and talk about the side effects of our medications. Our tales of woe inevitably end with my Grandma saying in her strong Midwestern accent with her trademark certainty, “Remember Brigit, someone else always has it worse.” One time she added, “Like Afghanistan!”
She’s not wrong.
Chronic pain. Chronic. A word that implies forever, something we promise to first loves but that can never be said in truth. A word for marijuana, people passing joints in circles that feel never-ending. A word that doctors use to tell me my brain is a broken circuit, re-living the same fear over and over again, sending pain to my hip and leg as a warning of a danger that does not even exist. The word Chronic begins to mean nothing, and the pain feels like just… me. It’s like my leg symbolizes every angsty existential cliché. I say to the pain, like a philosopher would say to his notepad and to the possibility of a God, “Why do you exist? Do you even exist, or is it in my head? What is the point of all this? The meaning? How can you be so awful but also so good, propelling me forward and holding me up but causing me constant conflict?”
It’s around that point that I take my Percocet and veg out watching reruns of Revenge on ABC.
I will work to accept my pain, like I work to accept life, keeping in mind the Rilke quote that one should “live the questions” and not obsess about the answers, but I will still fight it, believe that what is is not what will always be. I will work to laugh about my pain as much as possible, to ignore it, treat it, sing lullabies to it, acupuncture it, tell it jokes, breathe it in and out in daily meditations, put steroids in it, vent about it, put balm after balm upon it, and, here today, write about it. My pain is not me, just another part of me, like my leg is a part of my body but is not the whole amazing organism, like my mind and body are one but not one. My pain has taught me earlier than many that no one thing defines every thing and certainly can never define me or my life, and that I am lucky that all I have is pain, that I am outrageously blessed to be able to walk because at any moment those natural gifts can change. My literal foundation – the legs that carry me – can be flawed, but still I am always held up.
And, hey, it’s always nice to be able to understand one’s Grandma a little better.
