The Dark Side of my Pain

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I live with chronic back pain. I think people hear that so much it's hard to really embrace what that entails at times. I experience varying degrees of pain every second of every day. Every second. Every day. While the pain is always there underneath the surface it has many layers. I always have a painful uncomfortable tightness within me. My muscles have contracted to try and protect me therefore creating a whole other layer of discomfort. On top of the tightness the pain changes from a dull throbbing to crippling twinges to sharp shooting pains that travel to my legs and to my knees. Along with all of that comes a myriad of side effects from emotional to psychological to the closest people around me even being effected negatively. The hardest part is the part where my pain, my problem has spread like a sickness to those I love. That hurts more than any of the physical pain I deal with on a daily basis.

I recently started feeling this need to journal. To lay down in words what I have been experiencing. In turn maybe it will help people understand me and help me understand what I am going through more clearly. I look back at where I started and see this grieving process I have been going through of the life I had to the one I am currently living. People use the word journey a lot to describe chronic pain and I hadn't thought of it like that before, but it IS a journey. It's something very real that I have been quietly going through almost in denial and it's time for me to reflect, grow, and move forward as someone_with_chronic pain. I may not ever experience life again as I once did, but I want to try and build an even more successful life than the one I was leading because suddenly I have the greatest motivator of all:  The will to not be consumed by pain for the sake of me, my dreams, and my family.


The Storm

So, I have this mental image or lets say a visual in my head of my back pain. I see it and feel it as if it is a black hole or mass that has attached itself to my lower back. It moves and mutates like storm clouds in the sky always there in motion on the surface. Now lets add some lightning into the mix and that would be the perfect illustration of the sharp spreading pains and crippling twinges I feel within the ever-changing storm that has taken over. This storm is so powerful it inevitably takes a toll on me. Me. Me as in the person inside this broken body experiencing this alone and is scared. Scared that at any moment this pain will finally win and I will not be able to move. I have been living in a very scary lonely place for a long time. A place that just like a storm I have no control over. A place where the weather forecast is grim and even on the sunniest days there are still rolling black clouds lingering in the not so far off distance



The Dark Side of my Pain

That is what I am going to call my new journal project. This thing that has happened to me is so strange because it's not something I can see or show people. It's faceless and pretty much nameless because the word pain just doesn't seem adequate. I guess that is why it has taken form as this black hole. It could consume me and take over my life, but I am trying to not let it. That's what I want to write about. The battle against the black hole. Oh yes, now we are talking. All I need are some B actors, some light savers, some bad lighting and Steve on the Casio keyboard. I will of course provide the cheesy overwritten narration.