Writing With Pain

Your creative hopes and goals still matter, even when they cannot be a focus.

The other day, I jokingly told my physical therapist that they’ve earned a spot in my book’s acknowledgments. “If I do manage to finish this book,” I said, “it’ll be because of you.” (At this point, I could probably say the same thing to my massage therapist and my therapist-therapist.) I have another manuscript revision due this week—third draft’s the charm, right?—which is frankly terrible timing, because for much of the last two weeks I’ve been unable to write without pain.

Neither my chronic pain nor my chronic illness is immediately perceptible to others. It’s hard to tell someone about your health after they’ve made a “joke” or said something grim about a condition you happen to have; it can be equally difficult when they’ve simply assumed that you must have no health issues at all. Sometimes, too, I feel like an imposter when I try to talk or write about mine: There are long stretches when my energy is high, when the test results are good, when the pain dulls to an ache I can almost-but-not-quite ignore. I am an enormously privileged person who is able to access the ongoing health care I need in order to live and work and care for my family and myself. But I’m not a machine, and I am increasingly aware of this fact as I work to meet my book deadline.

If I don’t often write about my pain, I have had to learn to write with it. Sometimes this means literally writing through it, because there is work I cannot put off. Other times, writing with pain means paying attention to it, listening to my body, and resting if that is an option.

I’ve found similar lessons in learning to write with pain and learning to live with grief: Both have forced me to awaken to specific needs and limitations, as well as the fact that what I want to do may not always line up with what is possible. Struggling against this reality, denying myself rest or care or other things I need in the name of nonstop productivity, won’t make it any easier to create the things I hope to create. I need to offer myself the same grace I would extend to anyone else.

You may have noticed that a topic frequently visited in this newsletter is how to sustain a creative life while treating yourself humanely. That word, sustain, is the key—because we all experience days when it may be difficult or impossible to write, for any number of reasons, and it’s important to remember that what we are actually trying to establish is a practice that will endure; that will allow us to do the creative work we love and need to do over years, decades, a lifetime.

I would love to be able to say that I understood this before the pain, before deep personal losses, before a pandemic upended our lives and reminded us of our interconnectedness as well as our fragility. But I’ve been conditioned, as many of us have under capitalism, to always do more; to say yes to everything. Only in the last couple of years have I come to grasp the true necessity of rest, and care, and patience. The creative life I want to sustain is not possible without these things.

I had planned to spend all last week at my desk, revising my book. Then a new injury added another layer of pain, and I had to spend several days resting instead. Rest wasn’t a cure. I’ve yet to find a work setup that doesn’t hurt—it is still painful to write at my standing desk, and it’s painful to lie down in bed and write, and it’s painful to do nothing except sit and convert oxygen into carbon dioxide and think about my pain. But I hurt less than I did last week, and I have been able to tackle my manuscript again. I know that giving myself a break when I needed to probably made the difference.

A diagnosis, a family crisis, the upheaval of grief—these things can and will happen to just about all of us at one time or another. If right now you’re going through something that makes it especially hard for you to do the writing you want to do, if other pressing needs or responsibilities are demanding your energy and you have little to spare for anything else, I want you to know that I see you and support you. Your creative hopes and goals still matter, even when they cannot be a focus. Your projects will still be there when you are able to give them a greater share of your attention. You are doing what you can do, and it is enough.