not
It’s been my constant companion for over half of my life. I should be well acquainted with it by this point, and yet it is hard to put into words.
We first became familiar when I was twelve. One day there was nothing. The next, a mild discomfort. A week in, and for many weeks after, it was a deep throbbing at the base of my spine, a persistent ache, a relentless misery.
It hurt to do simple things, like sitting at a desk or riding my bike. Or laughing. It hurt to laugh. I was passed around from specialist to specialist until we ended up at the children’s research hospital. X-rays and MRIs turned up nothing.
Then after nine months, almost as quickly as it came on, the pain was gone. And we stopped seeing the specialists.
I had several good years, but slowly it crept in again. The back pain returned after a car accident. Then migraines, the joint pain, the shooting nerve pains. Electric pulses, like being shocked, that take my breath away. More specialists. Rheumatologists, Oncologists, Hematologists, Neurologists. Blood counts that are never normal.
They couldn’t tell me what the problem was. Only what it wasn’t. We need more information. We need more time. We need to see how things progress. I have two solid diagnoses, but most are differential.
Recently I entered a rabbit hole while rereading The Marriage Plot (my least favorite Eugenides, but still good). Of Grammatology is mentioned quite a bit throughout the novel. I don’t pretend to have a great grasp on Derrida, so I was due a refresher course. I wish I could site the exact article I was reading, but one sentence stood out to me. Something about the meaning of words being just as important as what they don’t mean. This made me think of the Big Thief song "Not".
And so on, for the entire song. Never what it is about, whatever ‘it’ is. Only about what ‘it’ is not. It’s a wild concept really, as a word has a finite number of meanings, usually only a couple, and an infinite number of things it doesn’t mean.
With the pain, the thing is, it’s easier to say what it’s not vs. explaining what it is. What it is shifts from day to day, and maybe it’s better I don’t put it into words. Maybe that makes it more manageable.
What it isn’t -
Freedom. Comfortable, consistent sleep. Being considered ‘reliable’. Walks and hikes. Traveling as much as I would like. Going to see bands. Working full time. Saturday mornings at the big farmers’ market. Uninhibited Intimacy. Security. I could go on. Because the things the pain isn’t, the possibilities it eliminates, while not infinite could become a very long list.
Most days I can handle it, but I suppose that’s mostly because I choose to deal with it. Mentally, if nothing else.
This rambling train of thought courtesy of the fact I had to leave work early today and take a two hour nap because I couldn’t get ahead of the pain and meds weren’t cutting it.
9:39 p.m. - 2023-06-16