This was one of the comments I’ve heard recently. When it first registered, I felt a flash of irritation, but honestly, I’ve thought about the comment ever since.
The lady who told me this, in a way, is right. I’m too young to have to deal with chronic pain. Most people deal with persistent aches and pains when they’re older, when they’ve lived a full life. Instead, I’ve had to grow up with the pain, learn to live with it. I’ve lost two of my grandparents while in pain instead of becoming one, like what’s supposed to happen in the cycle of life, and I’ll probably go to college while in pain.
I try not to be bitter, but it’s hard. Going through adolescence causes a lot of people to dislike their bodies. Going through adolescence with chronic pain made me hate mine.
Recently, my chronic pain has gotten progressively worse. The increased pain has led to depression on my part because I feel hopeless. I love my life, but being in pain indefinitely is a difficult reality to face sometimes. It’s even more difficult not to loathe my body when I feel it has let me down so drastically.
Having cerebral palsy limits my ability to do many physical activities. What physical things I can do—like walking and climbing stairs—are made ten times harder because of my chronic pain. At times I feel that chronic pain has taken away the rest of my physical ability, but I won’t let it. I will fight my pain, but all the fighting makes me despise myself more.
When aspects of my life are untethered—being in a severe amount of pain, being depressed, struggling to love my body—I cling to my faith. I believe there must be a reason for everything. Thinking this way helps me get unstuck and allows me to find a purpose.
As I’ve grappled between despising and trying to love myself and my body, I’ve thought about what the reason could be for my pain and suffering. Not the cause, but the reason.
Laying in bed at night, gritting my teeth against the throbbing and aching in my hips, it takes at least two hours from the time I go to bed until I can actually sleep, so I use the time to think.
What I’ve come up with is this:
My pain gives me purpose. My chosen career is to be a rehabilitation counselor so I can help other people with disabilities improve their mental health. I do already have cerebral palsy, but my chronic pain gives me a supplemental experience to relate to my future clients.
More important than that, though, my chronic pain will teach me to love myself unconditionally. I struggle with self-love, but I will be the first to say that it is very important. I am working on learning to love myself in therapy right now, because if I don’t learn that skill, I will be miserable living my life in a body I can’t stand. I need to change how I think about myself and my body. I love others unconditionally, so I might as well give myself the same grace.
My chronic pain will make that goal of self-love more thorough. When people learn to love themselves, that love often stops at their bodies. My chronic pain affects every aspect of my mind and body. The way my body feels at any given time impacts how I think about myself, so in other words, to change one will change the other.
Because I have chronic pain, to love my body unconditionally means to love it no matter what it can do. My pain changes on a day-to-day basis, so my expectations of myself need to change, too. If I can walk a long distance one day and then I’m in severe pain the next day, I need to learn to love myself anyway. After all, how can I help other disabled people with self-love if I can’t love myself?
So on my bad days, on the days where every step is an internal battle, on the days where I wonder if my pain will ever get better, I remind myself that pain has a purpose. I tell myself that although my pain causes suffering, if it lets me help others, it is all worth it. And if I can endure pain throughout my life and learn to love myself at the end of this, it is honestly the best sign of a life well-lived.