You know one of the shittiest parts of chronic pain?ย
Sympathy has an expiration date.ย
If youโre hurting because you broke your leg, people can sympathize with you, because thereโs an end-date. Eventually your leg will heal and youโll be okay again. People will coo and coddle and bring you chocolates and sign your cast because they know thatโs emotional labor that they will only have to perform temporarily.ย
But if you have a chronic condition that causes you daily pain, after awhile, people get annoyed with having to deal with you. They ask you whatโs wrong, and when you reply with the same thing that was wrong last week, or the week before, or the month before, you eventually get an incredulous,ย โStill?โย
Or maybe theyโre not that overt. Maybe instead they go,ย โOh, just that. Okay.โ As if todayโs pain should somehow be fine for them to ignore because itโs nothing new. No need to worry: itโs just the same old same old.ย
Let me tell you: Pain never gets easy to handle. Itโs not like people with chronic pain develop an immunity to it, or that we stop feeling it. Sure, some of us get better at ignoring it, or better at living around it, but honestly? Most of us just get better at hidingย it, because we get tired of feeling like an emotional burden to everyone around us.
But that doesnโt mean that weโre not hurting, and it sort of sucks that long-term pain, in addition to all the other fun things it entails, also eventually comes with a revoked right to be sympathized with, or even just treated like something other than a whiny attention-grabbing faker (or worse: a drug-seeker).
Chronic pain is real. And it sucks. And one of the worst parts about it is knowing itโs never going to end.ย
It would just be cool if people could try understand that, I guess.
