copium7777
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Helpless--An essay about chronic pain and illness
- Thread starter copium7777
- Start date
copium7777
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2020
- Messages
- 411
another essay I wrote about similar topics:
Against Survival
For most of the time I've been sick, I haven't been able to cry. It's as if my body hasn't had the spare energy to process gri...atomicchesterton.blogspot.com
copium7777
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2020
- Messages
- 411
For most of the time I've been sick, I haven't been able to cry. It's as if my body hasn't had the spare energy to process grief, or really any emotions. After all, how can you process a trauma when the trauma is ongoing?another essay I wrote about similar topics:
Against Survival
For most of the time I've been sick, I haven't been able to cry. It's as if my body hasn't had the spare energy to process gri...
I have an illness that , officially at least , has no cure. There are promising experimental treatments , sure, but there is not a single FDA approved treatment. And most of us don't even get palliative care for the symptoms. The quality of life of this illness is so low that for awhile, I didn't know how people lived with the reality that there are no treatments. Now I realize that they don't live with that reality. I remain convinced it's an impossible reality to accept, one that would tear a person apart.
I have never lived with that reality. And although my life--youth, social life, vocation, ability to make art-- has been stolen from me, I haven't grieved much. I have to smile through physical and emotional pain. My body has been an affectless automaton. At one point in my illness when I got a lot worse , probably from my brainstem compression becoming worse , I started to tolerate listening to music a lot less. Listening to music was one of the last things that tied me to who I was before illness.
Since then I have become more and more vacant. And given that I have not been offered much in the way of palliative care, I have opted to distract myself from pain and boredom by scrolling the internet, consuming forgettable and numbing content, using a phone as a narcotic. I have become someone that would have been unrecognizable to the ambitious artist and musician I was years ago. I have become the worst possible thing--boring...
Foreigner
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I relate 100% to this, thank you. I have been dealing with life threatening illness for 5 years now, off and on. Modern medicine is useless at best, at worst they are complicit in causing more illness. The person that I was before I got sick... the trajectory was so promising, so much potential. It feels robbed from me now. I feel cursed. But like you, what's worse is that I feel erased. When you aren't well enough to explore life or engage in the activities that define you as a person, you become no one. I've taken that to a spiritual place, myself... but some days, when I'm feeling really attached, it's brutal. I alternate between being in pain to neutrality. It doesn't tend to go above baseline.
I feel left behind. The burgeoning friendship circles I was developing as I turned 30 have all but disappeared. Every time I tried to get back up and into the race, it never lasted. Everything requires health. If you don't have it, you can't maintain it... and people don't come to you. They do at first because they can't believe what's happening to you. Then as the years go by they accept that this is who you are now, the person who they can maybe see once in a while, and under restricted circumstances.
What humanity is doing to this planet and to each other is destroying human bodies. It has destroyed mine. A series of toxic events made me this way. Antibiotics, vaccines, and shitty, poisoned food grown by industry. I will never be the same. I feel crushed every day and have to live with that.
Like you, I don't even have the energy to cry. I'm also tired of crying alone. I've thought that maybe I should just end my life. No life seems more appealing than a meaningless, suffering life. I feel erased.
