Chronic pain & you
We met when I was 23, and you 31. It was all-consuming, passionate, earth shattering, transformative. On our fourth date I told you I had known you in a life past, and that meeting again had fully crystallised my one in this: fresh, bright, birthed. This was a physical knowledge: by your side I was more balanced and whole in a body I too often see as broken and disparate.
But our rediscovered strength could not alone mend the depths of my fragility, accumulated over years of eroded boundaries. Sometimes I forget why all my female friends are anxious, stressed, sick, and am always quickly, violently reminded. Like most women, my worth is defined by the sexual pleasure I give men (my dad, my boss, my closest friends). From the age of eleven I walked the world through their unwavering objectification, perpetually tensed in this predatory constant. At twenty, my ability to meet and learn my grown body—her hunger, her rest, her pleasure—was ruptured further by unending medical appointments: prodded, poked, legitimised, colonised by biomedical uncertainty disguised as scientific truth.
“At twenty, my ability to meet and learn my grown body—her hunger, her rest, her pleasure—was ruptured further by unending medical appointments: prodded, poked, legitimised, colonised by biomedical uncertainty disguised as scientific truth.”
We learn to huddle together in our feminism and our pain, writing and rehearsing scripts of resistance and resentment. In friendships, I am held up as the strong vocal smart one. My friend once asked me whether it was actually good that I could turn everything into a feminist issue, even sex, which surely should be a space of naive and yielding joy. This surprised me, not only because I disagreed but because she was wrong. I could bring feminism (as an objective social understanding), but I had always struggled to bring feminism (as a liberated outcome for myself) into my intimate relationships. I can notice and name the patriarchy, but I do not know how to invite myself into the liberation we seek by dissolving it. My adult identity emerged too young and porous to the feminist and patriarchal narratives that surrounded me, dangerously entangling my understanding and necessity of self as pained woman: what femininity can I offer you if I no longer have my hurt?
“In friendships, I am held up as the strong vocal smart one. My friend once asked me whether it was actually good that I could turn everything into a feminist issue, even sex, which surely should be a space of naive and yielding joy.”
So when you said sex without protection felt better, I resisted my resistance. I did not want to be the hysterical weak girl, nor the educated stern woman. I did not want to bring you my body as hemmed by male and medical gaze, nor my body as warped and distorted by attempts to dodge their eyes. I wanted to let go of this unrelenting dance between female submission and feminist assertion: to play, desire, to discover. I wanted to give you me. To merge and meld with you because it felt right—and finally safe—to do so.
My period was only a couple of days late but I knew before the blue lines grew dark; part of me had willed and wanted it from the moment I put my hand in yours.
“I can notice and name the patriarchy, but I do not know how to invite myself into the liberation we seek by dissolving it.”
People were present and attentive before the surgery; something still illicit and scandalous and alluring about an unplanned pregnancy. So were we, lying on my sagging student mattress and conceiving of futures and families to bind us inextricably.
After the surgery I was alone. You uncertain and insecure on one side of the bed, me bleeding, flaring, furious on the other. Anger spilled uncontrollably; at your mum, the abortion clinic receptionist, the A&E doctor, you. I craved bland bran flakes and hot fast runs. I hurt myself again and again, desperate to expose me as the mother that could not yet be. Flaws lay strewn about the flat as we emptied and unpacked everything inside of us, silently testing and evaluating each other’s commitment to stay. The heavy reckoning with dis-ability crushed me, and now I understand it better, crushed you equally.
“Living and loving with you through chronic pain has taught me to crip and queer normative understandings of time, affording us new lineages and ancestries of connection.”
We often say we did our relationship in reverse, beginning where most couples end. This timeline mirrors my sickness; developing aches and ailments in your twenties inverts a linear understanding of ageing. Living and loving with you through chronic pain has taught me to crip and queer normative understandings of time, affording us new lineages and ancestries of connection. Instead of beginning or creating, finishing or breaking, you & I have travelled in infinitely more multiple and magic realms.