Category: Pain Blogging

So I’ve been having a really bad pain flare during this week just passed but I’ve been in very good spirits. Why? Because I’ve realised that these horrible pain flares are now relatively rare, only happening a couple of times a month and this one’s only lasted six days now. They used to happen all […]

At the start of the year, I made a Spotify playlist called “2018 will be magic”. It was a desire, a decision, a hope. 2017 was a year of trauma, of mental health collapse, of emotional abuse, of the worst sort of suicidal ideation, of conflict, of loss, of feeling the pain was forever and […]

When you have a disability and suffer from chronic pain, sometimes your achievements will be weaponised; “You could handle making a web series so you could handle having a job.” In fact, I can see how it must look from the outside, when I walk into social engagements bursting with energy, when my artistic output […]

My psychologist says that my pain is a trigger for me. He’s right. It happens when my arms and neck burn for weeks with neuropathic pain like hot needle pricks bubbling and fizzing ceaseless and seizing up my muscles so my hands grow tight and numb. This is when I start the stories about blame […]

I’ve been trying to make up for lost time, haven’t I? I’ve been trying to play catch up in a race that is rigged by forces beyond my control and perhaps exists only in my head. A competition between myself and imaginary rivals with doubters and detractors watching from the sidelines. “I told you so” […]

Just around this time last year, my husband Wes whisked me away in an aeroplane for an emergency holiday in Bali. I say “emergency” because that is how it felt to him, digging deep into his tax return, he flew me to a place that was tropical and vibrant as a means of emotional resuscitation, […]

You’re treading water in a vast and dark ocean full of sunken memories and shipwrecked dreams. I’m in my little boat with my little lamp, a carefully protected firelight. Dotted in the distance I can see other boats, other little lights that bob up and down. We communicate with words that float across the water […]

Days like today, days when my life feels so full and so ripe with possibility, days like today I am so fucking glad that I didn’t jump in front of that train. At those darkest moments, when everything hurt and I felt so worthless, when it felt like the pain and shame was all I […]

Tonight I am wallowing in a psychological rut. Letting go is so much easier when you’re moving forward, it’s this reality of my physicality that forces me to be still until the pain decreases. If the pain decreases. God it takes so long and the surgery has caused new issues that at least are not […]

“I just don’t want people to think of you as that cripple girl.” A lover said to me as we lay in bed together, he was questioning why I regularly wrote on social media about my experiences with my thoracic outlet syndrome. Later in our relationship, he begun to accuse me of whingeing and playing […]