Pain becomes her

How pathologising ourselves is causing an identity crisis

Photo by Fa Barboza on Unsplash

One of the most important things I learned about myself last year is that, despite being three years sober (now four), I had developed a new addiction. And unlike with alcohol and drugs, where I was fully aware of what I was doing and the potential harm I was causing, I had not seen this addiction coming, nor did I even realise it was possible for it to happen.

I was addicted to pain.

Real, physical pain in the form of the two chronic health conditions I had fought so hard to be diagnosed with, yes, but other kinds, too.

I was also addicted to my emotional pain, feeling hard done by because of what I’d endured to get those diagnoses, how much energy I’d invested in them. I’d done my research, learning more about my conditions than some doctors ever do, and committed myself to finding out what was wrong with me when they couldn’t. Once I received those diagnoses in 2020 and 2023 respectively, I was finally able to acknowledge that my life was changed forever by them. After previous years spent fighting against the thought of being limited in any way and self-medicating through heavy denial, it was a relief to stop resisting and accept the reality of my new life.

Spurred on by the internet, particularly in the chronic illness community, I quickly (though unconsciously) made being unwell part of my identity. After all, the limitations of my body did impact my daily life and mental health, so what was the use in pretending otherwise? I was encouraged to take pride in my new identity, adopting terms like ‘spoonie’ and ‘zebra’ in the support groups I joined. I was a new member of an old social club, where everyone understood each other deeply and wanted the same things. There were in-jokes and memes galore, unquestioning support, and discussions on how to navigate life as an unwell person.

Being in these groups where, finally, people believed me and didn’t dismiss my pain was comforting and validating, something that had been starkly missing in my interactions with health care professionals. And as I’d recently moved to a new area and was more isolated from social groups than ever before, these communities not only gave me support and information, they provided a sense of camaraderie during a lonely and difficult period.

Not long after, I undertook therapy to help me learn to cope with the mind fuck that is daily, debilitating, chronic pain and the impact it had on my mental health. Through the work my therapist and I did to identify my physical and emotional triggers, I began to realise that I was also neurodivergent. The things that set off or exacerbated my stress and pain levels were largely sensory related - loud or shrill noises, conflicting noises (different conversations going on around me in particular), not having enough alone time between social interactions (including with my own family), having to ‘perform’ on camera or at live events for work, excessive mess and disorder, rude people with no regard for others, social injustices, and so on.

Recognising this made sense of so many things, from how I’d dealt with early parenthood (not well) to why I’d not been able to cope with the relentlessly manic hospital environment I worked in for six years. Lightbulbs were going off everywhere and another identity was uncovered.

But what I also learned through doing this work is that there is much more of a mind-body connection to my pain than I’d ever thought possible. Things I’d previously dismissed as unfounded woo - that childhood trauma can manifest in physical symptoms, or that chronic stress can cause chronic health conditions to develop - suddenly began to make sense when I realised they’d appeared in the lead-up to, during, and immediately after my breakdown in 2019, which was also the height of my alcohol addiction. My emotional and mental pain, when they could no longer be contained and needed to scream for my attention, manifested in the body where I could not ignore them. This was another lightbulb moment, though not one that included a new identity to cling to.

With my interest well and truly piqued, I set about learning more.

I read books on overcoming chronic pain by reframing the way I thought about it and doing daily practices to help rewire my neurotransmitters, which had become programmed to seek the dopamine hits I got when my pain was validated by others. I realised I had literally directed my brain to seek out hopelessness, to be angry all the time at the unfairness of having a broken body. That hopelessness and anger were keeping me sick, keeping me in pain, keeping me in a deep well of self-pity.

[A little aside here: My conditions are real and I definitely don’t believe that I can just positive-think them away, nor that anyone else can, but I was definitely making it worse by making being unwell a large part of my identity.]

It was around this time that I picked up A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, someone I’d filed in the Quack cabinet a while back without actually knowing anything about him or his work. Vaguely aware that he wrote about the role of the subconscious in identifying with pain, I thought I might find some mildly interesting insights. Instead, what I read blew me away.

“The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free from it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unonscious process, and to the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.”

And also this, on the role of resentment, which was something I was struggling with massively at that time:

“Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people, and adds even more energy to the ego. Resentment means to feel bitter, indignant, aggrieved, or offended. You resent other people’s greed, their dishonesty, their lack of integrity, what they are doing, what they did in the past, what they said, what they failed to do, what they should or shouldn’t have done. The ego loves it.”

I recognised myself in both of these passages, in much of what he wrote in fact. I could see for the first time how I was contributing to my own misery, that so strongly identifying as being unwell was keeping me in a victim mentality that was making me very unhappy. The veil began to lift.

Soon, the initial joy I experienced in the chronic pain communities faltered, and I found myself feeling agitated after consuming even a few minutes’ content. There was support there, yes, but so much anger, too. Anger at their own individual struggles but also at the world in general for not changing quickly enough to accommodate their needs. And though I could understand their desire to talk about and work towards those changes, I couldn’t stomach the environment that went with it. Absorbing endless complaints and cynicism began to wear on me.

I wanted so desperately to learn how to live with my conditions, not in spite of them, but it felt impossible when I was surrounded by negativity. I dreaded receiving messages from anyone, even friends, about their problems (particularly health-related ones) because it made me dwell on my own. I felt terrible about it, but I realise now that it was a pulling-away process that I had to go through to find my own path to healing and to rediscover joy.

After I unfollowed a ton of accounts and left the majority of the groups I was in, I felt like I could breathe again. I began to see glimmers of the old me, the person who had hope for the future, who believed there is more good in the world than bad and that we have more agency over our own happiness than we’d like to believe.

It’s unsurprising, then, that I soon began to realise the same thing was happening in the social justice movement, where ‘Everything and everyone is terrible’ seemed to be the accepted mantra. I noticed the same negative feelings arising in me when I consumed that kind of content, how it made me feel hopeless, helpless, and angry. Angry at them for being unable to see anything outside their own experience or perspective, angry at myself for having been part of it for so long, angry that we were all watching the fabric of society unravel and burn online and instead of being appalled, we were pulling up seats and warming our hands by the fire.

For a long time, I felt conflicted about what to do. Leaving the chronic illness community for my own well-being felt like a personal choice that harmed no one else, but leaving the echo chamber of the Left? That felt a lot more loaded. In the end, I chose to pioritise myself and my own happiness, though the privilege of being able to remove myself from ‘the struggle’ weighed heavy on my mind.

In the past, I had directed my ire at people who opted out of politics, incredulous that they weren’t more furious at the state of the world and doing everything in their power to rail against it. To care about the harm inflicted on the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in our society meant staying and fighting, no matter what. Conflict is exactly what it was, too; an internal battle I could never win that served only to exhaust me. Being angry all the time is incredibly hard work after all, with unintended consequences we might not even recognise at the time.

If I was going to be on Mastermind, my specialist subject would be ranting and raging against the capitalist patriarchy. It was an art I practised and perfected at the dinner table with my family, a not-infrequent occurrence. I thought I was being a positive influence on my children, helping them think of the world beyond our home and being aware of all the -isms they must not fall prey to as they became young adults. Helping them see the injustices they could and should take a stand against. And despite those values being ones I stand behind, my approach to communicating them to my children was negative and sometimes aggressive.

Last year, I began noticing the way my son remained silent and looked down when my daughter and I discussed gender politics and instances of sexism, making disparaging ‘jokes’ about how awful men are. He never said anything that worried me, but his silence spoke volumes. He clearly didn’t feel comfortable with our comments and, being the empathetic and senstive boy he is, was internalising some of our ire. For all my worries about him falling into the terrifyingly misogynystic alpha male and incel rabbitholes, I hadn’t recognised that being made to feel less-than in his own home might be precisely what drove him there.

At only 15 years old, I had unwittingly assigned him a burden of guilt for the actions of others in my clumsy attempt to help him recognise how dangerous and toxic some men are. He assured me that I hadn’t, but I apologised all the same and curbed my dinner table rants. I began talking to him more about good things going on in the world, the kind, clever men and women who are doing heroic and amazing things, about what positive actions we can take to look after ourselves and others.

For the first time, I could see how men and boys might feel a certain way about being lumped into one monolithic category (BAD) and how even the ‘good ones’ could feel helpless about influencing positive change when they are constrained by the patriarchy themselves, subject to exclusion, negativity, and violence for speaking out against it. For the first time, I could undersand why some of them choose to keep their heads down and stay in their own lane, focusing on being good men and rasing their sons to be the same, maybe challenging the odd sexist remark, and not a whole lot more. Maybe, like me, they’re preserving their mental health and energy for the areas where they feel they can make the most difference, in small ways in their own communities, rather than out loud all over the internet. Maybe they too have deciced to stop spending more time on being seen as good than on actually doing good.

That’s not to say we should use our desire for comfortable, harmonious lives to excuse ourselves from being part of the social changes needed to eradicate oppression, but I suppose it raises questions about to what extent we are obligated to try and at what expense. Do we have to sacrifice our own well-being in order to demonstrate our dissatisfaction with the state of the world? How many pieces of our soul do we owe to the movement, and which can we keep for ourselves? How do we reconcile our own need to avoid harm with the harm being done to others? Whose pain is more important? That last part is where we have stumbled.

Being forced to rank our oppression and form our identities around where we stand in that ranking is precisely what has pitted the Left against each other and, increasingly, recognised as its chief failure. When we make our political beliefs the basis of our identity, we begin to see different beliefs as an attack on our very selves. Focusing on what others haven’t done, what we have been refused, and how we differ - instead of how we’re alike, how to achieve common goals, and how to create positive change - will undoubtedly be the cause of our demise. ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your own face’ is the phrase that comes to mind.

Without the doom spiral of social media keeping me in a negative head space, I can see all of this so clearly now. As a result, I’m the happiest I’ve been for years and no longer feel held hostage by my beliefs or my body.

I am no longer sick with despair because I no longer identity as ‘sick’. I have pain, but I am not suffering with it. Most importantly, even when I have pain, I have hope.

Hope is recognising that my values don’t have to change for me to choose to put my energy where I feel it has the most benefit, to both society and myself.

For me, that’s returning to my passion for women’s rights and health, but on my own terms.

It’s returning to writing essays like these, but without the shackles of what others might think or being worried that someone might disagree with what I’ve said.

It’s not giving a toss if other people’s experiences and interpretations differ from my own, because we are not required to think and feel the same.

It’s rediscovering who I actually am when I free myself from labels, no longer categorising or limiting myself through the strictures of identity politics.

Finding my voice again and not apologising for it is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done, and the most honest. As a journalist, memoirist, and essayist, that’s all I’ve ever been interested in: the truth. Not your truth, maybe, but my own.

At the end of the day, that’s all we have.