My body is a collection of wounds: one broken nose, two dislocated shoulders, and a curved spine. My body is a museum filled with past illnesses and pain. My body tells my story; when it is read, it reveals an intimate history of breakage and healing. Staring at my imperfections in the mirror, I am grateful to medicine for keeping my body alive when it was most vulnerable and broken.
But, I’ve learned that pain is not dissolved by medicine alone. While scientific precision and medical procedures may ease physiological burdens, pain lives on like a lingering odor, spilling out of closed stitches and completed surgeries. Pain is a vibrant and fluorescent hue. Pain is loud and vividly expressed. Though medicine may diminish physical pain, other dimensions of pain and illness continue to lodge themselves permanently into memories and emotions.
For me, pain is a hazy gray zone that wedges distance between myself and my body. I view it as a hint of weakness because it interrupts my ability to rely on and trust my body’s stability. I want to shelter-in-place in this vessel. I want to wake up each morning and know that my body will be about the same as yesterday — that it will not crumble, and that the pain will not spread from my lower back to leg to mind like a parasite. But, I know that my body undergoes metamorphosis when it succumbs to illness and pain. It hunches over like a wilted flower and ends up nauseated, brimming with an anxiety I try to neglect. Through my experiences, it troubles me to think of how my body can change so drastically without my approval and how I can lose control over something that is mine.
Yet, despite the prevalence of pain in my identity, it is notoriously difficult to verbalize. With pain comes a sense of isolation from my own body which then urges me to search for the right rhetoric and language to describe pain. Unable to find words, I turn to descriptions of physical metaphors like “I hurt” and “this aches.” Other times, I move to wincing, gnashing teeth, and shouting to convey my discomfort. I assume that such verbal and physical expressions can translate my muted feelings to loved ones and caregivers. I want to share my pain through physical motions and visible actions to ensure that my body can communicate for itself — that it can be understood despite feeling vulnerable. But, can pain be shared? Is pain a communicable language which others can pick up, process, and experience for someone else? Do individuals want to share pain, or is it built to be a solo-experience? And finally, what are the limits of empathy?
Such questions have always bolded themselves in my mind as I grapple with pain as both a physical sensation and an everlasting emotional experience. I’ve learned to let these brewing, conflicted thoughts settle down. Instead of flirting with pain, I opt to keep it as a hidden, silent stranger, denying the vacancy it leaves within my body. However, I’ve experienced a resurgence of these questions as bodies all around me succumb to infection and illness during the coronavirus pandemic.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve wrestled and made amends with pain and illness. After attending a few online health writing workshops, I’ve been able to interact with poets, students, writers, and teachers to discuss a range of literary works ranging from writer and physician Atul Gawande’s narratives on mindful healing to Virginia Woolf’s poem On Illness. Our conversations are an open arena to discuss pain as a critical part of being human, finding shelter in one’s body, and living.
After each weekly workshop, I add to my personal conception of pain, building on, and revising my initial beliefs. I’ve realized that pain is like walking through a new landscape, colored not with trees and greenery, but with tones of past events and memories. This new landscape is not your body, but it’s not entirely foreign either. It’s your body from a few weeks ago, maybe even months, when the pain was so vivid that you felt no room to express any other emotion. We must navigate our past selves to understand the origin of pain and why it continues to live on within us.
Our bodies are full of stories — stories of pain, healing, resurgence, and resilience. Entering the intimate space of your body to search for these stories is like searching a home for objects passed down from generation to generation. It’s the start of coming to terms with and expressing pain from the past. Though I still find verbalizing pain to be difficult, writing about the fragility of human bodies has encouraged me to reflect on what it means to be alive in and find shelter in an imperfect body. It is the blurriness of pain as both a physical sensation and an intangible memory that compels me to search for precision in language.
