![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
One of my skills is that I don't show pain. That's going to be ridiculous to anyone who reads this, I think, because a lot of pain spills out here. But my first instinct is always to smile, make my body move like normal, do the normal things, and just continue.
I seem to remember studies where emotional and physical pain light up the same regions of the brain. I'd believe it. A lot of emotional pain is pretty normal for me, for various reasons. Physical pain... is harder to know about. It's much easier to hide from myself than emotional pain is. Dissociation and displacement motions are second nature to me. I seem to interpret physical pain much lower on the intensity scale than emotional pain, which makes a certain amount of sense: my PDA experience means that the near-death sort of fight-or-flight is triggered super often, and very little physical pain matches that level of immediacy. Sure, maybe I can't think or move right, but I don't feel like I'll immediately die.
Yesterday I went into work and sat in my normal work chair, like I do a couple times a week, and my hip just lost it. From the top of my right hip through my pelvis and down my leg and into my ankle I felt burning/itching. Not searing, but hot and tight and awful. As I went through the day, got off work, went grocery shopping, and eventually came home and collapsed after chores I was trying to think: how would you rate this pain on a scale of 1-10? That's what they always ask, right?
8, because I literally cannot think of anything else.
4, because I can more or less still walk and drive short distances with I think enough attention not to run into things.
4, because I can control any involuntary sounds of pain in public.
9, because it significantly limits daily activities like driving, thinking, eating
5, because it's not an immediate threat to life but I'm not sure I could take more than a week of it continuously
I don't know. I took a couple hours off work this morning and just rested it and slept and it's pretty ok today, but it got me thinking about the whole thing.
Plus Tucker is going to see his girlfriend in the states this weekend, and that is likely to create a more immediate pain. A lot more food for thought.
It's easier to talk about physical pain, and folks are more receptive to both listening and to figuring out ways to help. Emotional pain-- those dynamics are harder, especially for me. The only people who can really understand are other PDAers, I think. Everyone else has been telling me all my life that so many experiences can't really feel like pain to me, or that if they do I'm just a bad human. I guess it's not surprising that my relationship to it is so fraught.
I just want to sit at the pottery wheel and get into my body. I want to be able to go up and plant things without feeling sick and weird in the sun. I'd like to come in after that and be held and have someone make dinner for me.
It's interesting, I think I messed up my brain meds a couple days ago. I am pretty sure I took a double dose, then missed a dose a couple days later (I couldn't remember if I'd taken it or not). So this pain seeps back in. Or maybe it's about Tucker, I don't know.
Either way yesterday was hard and today is hard.
I seem to remember studies where emotional and physical pain light up the same regions of the brain. I'd believe it. A lot of emotional pain is pretty normal for me, for various reasons. Physical pain... is harder to know about. It's much easier to hide from myself than emotional pain is. Dissociation and displacement motions are second nature to me. I seem to interpret physical pain much lower on the intensity scale than emotional pain, which makes a certain amount of sense: my PDA experience means that the near-death sort of fight-or-flight is triggered super often, and very little physical pain matches that level of immediacy. Sure, maybe I can't think or move right, but I don't feel like I'll immediately die.
Yesterday I went into work and sat in my normal work chair, like I do a couple times a week, and my hip just lost it. From the top of my right hip through my pelvis and down my leg and into my ankle I felt burning/itching. Not searing, but hot and tight and awful. As I went through the day, got off work, went grocery shopping, and eventually came home and collapsed after chores I was trying to think: how would you rate this pain on a scale of 1-10? That's what they always ask, right?
8, because I literally cannot think of anything else.
4, because I can more or less still walk and drive short distances with I think enough attention not to run into things.
4, because I can control any involuntary sounds of pain in public.
9, because it significantly limits daily activities like driving, thinking, eating
5, because it's not an immediate threat to life but I'm not sure I could take more than a week of it continuously
I don't know. I took a couple hours off work this morning and just rested it and slept and it's pretty ok today, but it got me thinking about the whole thing.
Plus Tucker is going to see his girlfriend in the states this weekend, and that is likely to create a more immediate pain. A lot more food for thought.
It's easier to talk about physical pain, and folks are more receptive to both listening and to figuring out ways to help. Emotional pain-- those dynamics are harder, especially for me. The only people who can really understand are other PDAers, I think. Everyone else has been telling me all my life that so many experiences can't really feel like pain to me, or that if they do I'm just a bad human. I guess it's not surprising that my relationship to it is so fraught.
I just want to sit at the pottery wheel and get into my body. I want to be able to go up and plant things without feeling sick and weird in the sun. I'd like to come in after that and be held and have someone make dinner for me.
It's interesting, I think I messed up my brain meds a couple days ago. I am pretty sure I took a double dose, then missed a dose a couple days later (I couldn't remember if I'd taken it or not). So this pain seeps back in. Or maybe it's about Tucker, I don't know.
Either way yesterday was hard and today is hard.
