I Am Not My Pain

Hello lovely friends. Sorry for not posting my usual pontifications lately but, on top of recovering from spinal surgery – which is going brilliantly btw – I have herniated a disc much higher up and, as a result have been living with nerve pain crippling my right arm  pretty much 24/7 for the last 6 weeks. It’s a pleasant change from the nerve pain that crippled my left leg for a year until June.

It is not fun, but as I keep telling my long-suffering wife, it’s just pain.

“To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”

Simone De Beauvoir 

Totally out of context, I know, but the danger of associating self with your body still rings true. 

One of the benefits of challenging your classification as a vertebrate by having someone drill into your spine is that you’re forced into stillness. Not incapacitated. Movement was a painful choice, but still mine to make. Not a bad lesson, tough as it is.

I found that, overwhelmed in the moment there wasn’t much I could do, but I could do something, so I did that. Each day I focused on what I could do and expanded it. The problem was that the only way I could have found this was by going into it, just like the proverbial walk through hell. The pain was there, still is, but it’s not all that’s there and it sure as hell isn’t the most important thing for me to focus on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m treating the pain - I’m not ignoring it, or inviting it. I am simply denying it the fuel of despair or the validity as an excuse. Just because something is loud and in your face, doesn’t mean you need to give it your attention or wish and pretend it’s not. Usually, aggressive behaviour makes me suspicious of what’s being hidden behind the bluster. What was being hidden was a lesson in acceptance, in how I limit myself simply by what I choose to give my attention to and my attitude towards that thing.

“The body is not a thing; it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”

Simone de Beauvoir

The body is my context. Like my thoughts, it is merely a perspective from which my consciousness experiences life. I am not my body any more than I am my arm. I am not myself any more than I am just the voice in my head. The body and its sensations, my thoughts, consciousness and life – they’re all parts of the whole. None of them could ever be all there is, so I won’t let one alone dominate and when it does try, become aware of what I am capable of doing within this context, quietening its demands for attention like pacifying a toddler.

It’s just pain. Happily, I am not just my pain.