Living with pain

I have friends who live with great pain in their bodies, not a mere paracetamol or ibuprofen pain, but the kind that gets offered the strongest pills possible which still only dulls the worst moments.   They don’t talk about the daily pains that often – it is enough to feel it without talking about it too, and they don’t want to bore you or themselves with saying that it hurts every time someone asks ‘how are you?’

I admit to being a wimp over physical pain, and don’t even mention nausea!  What my friends live with as normal would lay me out.  But life has to be lived, and my friends like so many others find a way to keep functioning with these pains.

If only it were that easy - physically or emotionally

When they do mention how bad a day is – then it is a day when it is not just the permanent ‘normal’ pain (which the rest of us would consider a ‘bad day’) but an extra extra bad day when the meds are not helping much – or at least it feels they aren’t, though how much worse could it be without them? We all experience pain, but they live with it.

To understand depression is a similar distinction – yes we all have low days but to live with depression is to have as a normal what those without the illness know as a really bad day.  We may not tell you how tough living with that emotional pain as daily life is, like my friends finding a way to function with great physical pain, so those of us living with depression find ways to function in the big wide world.   Physical or emotional, you may not glimpse the limp or grimace with a wave of pain, we have got used to not letting it show.  But it costs us – this functioning and blending in.

And some days the cost is beyond our budget, beyond our energy overdraft limit – then we may say ‘I’m not too good today’. But remember we are likely to be using a completely different scale, so saying ‘I’m having a bad day too’ – unless you are using the same currency as us – is not really understanding.   In the same way as if I were to respond to one of my friends whose body is regularly wracked with extreme pain with the comment ‘yeah? I have a bit of a headache today too’.

I am sure that on a normal day they would be very willing to commiserate with my headache, but I should not be under any illusions that I understand their experience.

So when someone living with depression doesn’t talk about how it feels, don’t assume our normal is your normal.  And when we do say it is a bad day then believe that it is and give us space when functioning is a challenge.

They say that ‘grass is greener on the other side’ – strangely that is not the case here, at least for me, having learned to live with depression it is a housemate (lifemate?) whose habits I have got to know and learned to cope with at some level.  As said I am a wimp about physical pain and so the challenges of friends living with that seem much worse than my own journey. I wonder if they feel the same about depressive pain?

I write this on a functioning day, but where depression is as always lurking in the background, in the hope of helping anyone travelling with someone with depression to understand a bit of the difference in what we say and what that describes.

Behind the masks...

This week I have been in various groups where I have heard of the struggles in people's lives.  This reflection is a response to that.
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I stood in the crowds rushing around the shops, I felt like my life was falling apart, the world had drastically changed, so how could everyone wander round as normal?

Then a messenger stopped and stood by my side, she began to point people out –

She is grateful for the winter, no-one questions the long sleeves that cover the bruises, and the bruises of the mind are invisible – but he is always apologetic…..

The man stopping to chat to everyone with a cheery smile is on his only trip out of the week, at home he cares for his mother who needs help 24/7 and in confusion doesn’t know him and gets frightened and angry.

That young woman is picking her way through the crowd carefully, she is terrified of talking to anyone – she feels she is barely holding her mind together, and feels overwhelmed by the most basic of things.

The messenger got quicker –

His every step is agony of pain; she is worried sick about her son; she dreads Christmas since her husband died, and the children live so far away; he lost his job in the cuts this year and the mortgage is behind; and so it went on.

The messenger turned to me and said, ‘This is the normal each one wanders around with, just as you do, and each one looks at the others in awe of how normal they all are and feeling they are alone in the crowd carrying their weight’

I wept seeing the pain hiding under every normal face and action, and for my own pain too.

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