My Journey Through Chronic Pain pt. 2: You Can't Keep Me Down

This morning I woke up in pain. I wake up most days in pain. From the moment I wake up. It can be kind of hard to feel motivated to do anything. Cause I’m in pain. It’s like, I want to wait for the pain to be gone before I have to get up and start my day. I just want that pain to go away, to just not be there, I just want to feel good, feel ok, feel comfortable in my own body. I think, If I just felt good, man it would be so much easier to be motivated to get up and do things. I so badly want to do things. I can picture it in my mind, just feeling so unrestricted, limber, with nothing in my way, ready top go, nothing pinching or grinding or aching or throbbing distracting me or inhibiting me. I want so desperately to feel that inhibited, that free. I want life to be that ‘easy’ again. It feels so unfair, that I have to move through and with this pain.

But I don’t have a choice. If I just lay there and wait, nothing happens. The pain doesn’t go away. In fact it’ll probably just get worse as laying around too much isn’t great for the body, things get stagnant and achey. So, there’s really no choice. I have to get up and do all the things that we all have to do, all those basic necessities, like eating, shitting, showering, working, but in pain. I get to see others get up and go about their day and they don’t seem to have this pain thing going on. It feels so unfair. Do they even know how good they have it? How much harder it is for me?

I think about how I wish I could’ve realized how good I had it before I had pain all the time. How I wish I could go back and make better use of the time I had where my body wasn’t so burdened. I try to remember back to when I used to not wake up with this pain, and I know there was a time without this pain, where I used to wake up feeling refreshed, recharged, capable, ready to go. But it was a long long time ago. Before school, before dysfunctional family life, before entering the work force, before relationships, a long time ago.

Since that time, and a long time before the pain started, the days where I woke up feeling refreshed, recharged, ready to go, gradually became less and less, until most days I would wake up feeling depressed, inhibited, unmotivated. I didn’t feel I had much to live for much of the time. Nothing seemed to ever be working in my life. Jobs, money, relationships, living situations, creative expression, everything, and I seemed to have very little control over any of it. It was hard to wake up and face my life. Face the things I had to do and experience everyday. But the feelings and thoughts I’d have in toward that life didn’t help with any of it. And they’re still here. And even if I can’t change the pain, I can change who I am within it, within myself, within what I’m allowing myself to experience when I wake up to face my day every day. It’s not going to get any easier. Am I going to let my pain be an excuse? Am I going to allow any excuse? I want to live.

I’ve had a hard life and I’ve made it through thirty-nine years of it til now. Apparently in all my past lives I never really lived either. That’s hard to swallow. And now I’m in position where I have the best chance I’ve ever had, maybe my only chance, to get to find out what it means to live for real. It took me a long time to get here, and now that I’m here, I’m not going to let my scars hold me back. I’m not going to let anything stand in my way. Some of us never make it.

I’ll be damned if anything is going to keep me down now. How much time do I have left? How much time do I really have before the pain gets too bad that I can’t bear to be alive anymore? Will I get to have children? Will I get to see them grow up? Will I be able to be there for them? How long will I get to have with my partner? The rest of my life? What does that mean? Forty years? Twenty years? Two years? How the hell do I know? It doesn’t matter. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Maybe the pain will be reasonably manageable for the rest of my life to a ripe old age. That’d be awesome, I’m totally down with that. But whatever happens, I don’t want to WASTE THE TIME I DO HAVE.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to wish the pain would just go away, just not be here.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to want to just wait until the pain is gone, to not want to move until I feel no pain and it doesn’t hurt.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to allow the pain as an excuse to feel unmotivated to get up and face my day.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to compare my situation to others who don’t experience waking up with this pain every day, and use this comparison point to make myself feel bad for my situation. What does it matter what another is experiencing when this is the reality that I am in, and thus what is relevant to me. There is no ‘me now here without this chronic pain’, so it doesn’t make sense to tease myself with some idea of that which isn’t real. My experience is not the same as anyone else’s. Some people have it even worse than me. Some better. That is how it is and doesn’t change my situation in the moment.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to make my experience worse and ‘add difficulty’ to what is already a difficult situation through comparison and allowing myself to wish that my reality was not as it is.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to waste time in thoughts and feelings toward my experience or whatever it is I’m facing currently in my life, whether it is chronic pain, relationships, work, basic necessities, living in lack, feeling powerless or limited in my reality in some way.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to waste time in feelings instead of focusing on solutions, and becoming the solution, and living as much as I am capable of no matter what my situation is and how limited it may be or seem.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to resist facing my life and my immediate reality, because it doesn’t ‘feel good’ as me not ‘feeling good’.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to want to only move myself when it feels good.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to limit myself and my movement to an idea of what ‘could be’ or ‘should be’ in terms of how I could be feeling or experiencing myself.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to want to just ‘wait’ for things to somehow get better, when things usually don’t get better through just waiting, they usually get harder and more difficult, and so really the best time is always now.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to consider doing anything other than moving myself and continuing with my life and living to my fullest capability.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to fear that I might not have much time left or that my experience might become much worse. If it does, it does, but I can’t predict that, nor do I want to be wasting any of the time I do have on thinking about how things might get worse. If things did get worse, I know I would regret having wasted my time, just as I already do in looking back at my past before I was living with this pain and wasted time in my thoughts and emotions toward whatever ’unpleasantness’ I was experiencing in my life. There can always be excuses to not move myself to my fullest potential. I don’t want to look back on my life and wonder why I didn’t make the most of this one opportunity I had in the time that I had.

I forgive myself that I’ve accepted and allowed myself to judge or blame myself for wasting my time in the past on thoughts and emotions toward my experience as I didn’t understand then what I do now and didn’t have the tools that I have now to walk myself through and out of these patterns.

I commit myself to continue letting go of these patterns of limitation so that I am not holding myself back in any way from living my life to the fullest.

I commit myself to using the tools that I do now have of self writing and self forgiveness to assist myself with letting go of these patterns so that I am not standing in my own way of living to my utmost potential.

I commit myself to facing whatever is in my reality, even if it means there will be pain, because at this point there is no life without pain, suffering is literally a part of life until we get this reality sorted out, and to do that requires that we sort ourselves out, with whatever capacity we have, accepting no excuses. If we just wait for things to feel good or change for the better, it never will. It will never be a better time, things won’t just get easier. If you have a look, this is what we’ve been doing in existence, putting of dealing with our reality as we’ve created it, because it doesn’t feel good, because it means pain and discomfort. But to accept things how they are and not change is to also accept pain and discomfort, and to just let it get worse and harder to stand up and make a change and get through it.

I commit myself to not wait for things to get worse, within hoping they would somehow get better, and have to face even more difficulty and discomfort and still have the same issues before me to get through.

I commit myself to living comfort, ease, readiness, eagerness, passion, within myself to create the best possible environment within myself and to support my physical body to be its best self and live to its fullest potential.

I commit myself to live in gratefulness for the functionality that I do have, to live in appreciation for what is available to me and to face the day ready, willing, and eager, to utilize what is available to me to live, grow, expand, nurture and nourish myself and my world to the utmost of my ability.