You know one of the shittiest parts of chronic pain?Â
Sympathy has an expiration date.Â
If youâre hurting because you broke your leg, people can sympathize with you, because thereâs an end-date. Eventually your leg will heal and youâll be okay again. People will coo and coddle and bring you chocolates and sign your cast because they know thatâs emotional labor that they will only have to perform temporarily.Â
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 whatâs 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, âStill?âÂ
Or maybe theyâre not that overt. Maybe instead they go, âOh, just that. Okay.â As if todayâs pain should somehow be fine for them to ignore because itâs nothing new. No need to worry: itâs just the same old same old.Â
Let me tell you: Pain never gets easy to handle. Itâs 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 hiding it, because we get tired of feeling like an emotional burden to everyone around us.
But that doesnât mean that weâre 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 itâs never going to end.Â
It would just be cool if people could try understand that, I guess.
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