Pain

As I move into ping.FM and Twitter to microblog the quotidian, I am find it is increasingly harder for me to use blogging as a personal space. I am gradually leaving blogging to the realm of "big think" publishing that takes longer to write and produce and certainly longer to read and react to.

Yet today I am making an exception because there's another reason for my not writing as much as I would like to. That reason is pain.

I have been consumed by the pain that ails me and my body at any given time of the day for the last year and a half. And yes, I speak of my body as a separate entity because as someone who is her 40s, I am suffering from the realities of this twilight age where the youthfulness of my body doesn't mesh with the decomposing realities of a body that by evolutionary standards should have been turned to dust if not 5 years ago, then right about now.

Pain is nothing new in my blogging life. Actually, as I created this blog to break free from the shackles of a writing block that I had dragged into motherhood from my years as a PhD candidate, I found that the only thing I could rant about was pain. Here's an example from 2003 :

One of my earlier posts was exactly about pain and about not knowing how to deal with this body I've been trapped in since I gave birth to my children :
c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: practice | Outside of the fact that I am feeling really old these days --my birthday is in a couple of days-- all these aches and pains are really pointing to my life 'before' and 'after' kids.

In my 'life before kids' there was no sciatica. Running was not an issue. I had no known food sensitivities. I wrote every day for a living for 7 years straight. I was a repository of all the current trends in critical theory. I could read a 300 page long book in 2 days. I worked out 5 days a week.

In life after kids, every single muscle in my body hurts. There are whole classes of foods I cannot eat anymore. It is quite an achievement if I can finish a book within a month's time --it is quite outstanding if I can do so in a within a week. The height of critical theory these days is Dr Seuss and if I can touch my toes during a forward bend, I actually celebrate it.

It's as if I have been forced to live inside somebody else's body and I have no idea how I got here. The sad part is that I barely remember how it was before --I am just getting over the physical trauma of child birth.

It's 5 years since I have written this and now, added to my pain management tribulations I have the "value added" of the depression that comes from your body being bombarded by the wrong kind of endorphins. The way I've described it to my family doctor who is also a homeopath is in terms of war : My body is at war with me.

First we have sciatica on the left or "ying" side of my body. And it's a pain that, ironically comes around my menstrual cycle. I can go from 60 to 0 in just one bat of an eye when that sciatic nerve gets inflamed.

Yet that pain has been mild in comparison to the excruciating pain I have been suffering on my feet especially the right foot. Interestingly enough, the right side is the male side and the side of "action".

I get prostrated not only by the amount of walking or standing up. The stress of not being able to take action as fast or as easily as I could have if I didn't live in pain all the time is taking a real toll on me. There's days the pain is so bad on my foot that it gets in the way of writing because it shoots all the way up to my neck, ears and teeth.

Oh yeah baby, when I do "pain", I go all the way.

So for more than a year and a half now I have been sleeping on the floor. Mattresses are fine, but there's nothing like the comfort of feeling my muscles "melt off" the bones and sink placidly on the makeshift tatami I call my bed.

The pain has been horrid enough that I cannot have a consistent exercise practice, yet stretching has become more and more a necessity --I just stopped for 30 minutes so I could stretch out of a pain on the base of my neck that shoots all the way to the fingers on my right hand.

Homeopathy has been my main source of healing for almost 10 years but recently I've had to take on also an anti-depressive medication : The pain is so terrible that I've cried myself awake many mornings and I it has gotten so bad that it has indeed cut dramatically my ability to write, do house chores or play with my kids.

And there's the weight --and that's definitely a topic I will be blogging here. I've put on the post-baby weight I had lost around 2003 due to this pain and I am now carrying around an extra 30 pounds that are putting a toll on my back, hips, knees and ankles.

Why do I write this? I've been baffled by comments from people who've remarked on how prolific I am. It's baffling to me because of how much pain I have to endure on a daily basis to put out the piddling of 2 or 3 posts I put out in a day. It's baffling because for every post I complete there's at least 5 that didn't make it.

So I needed to get out there that, even though I am grateful for what I can indeed accomplish, I'm still learning how to deal with the frustration of knowing how much more I could accomplish if it weren't for the pain.

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