Look to your left. Tell me what you see, hear, are experiencing

…it’s still dark

The whimsical writing prompt for today is kind of perfect (I’m afraid to use the word perfect, and so I qualify it, which means it’s imperfect, I suppose, like me).

Look to your left. Tell me what you see, hear, are experiencing.

It’s dark. The light of my phone is barely illuminating the space. I can just barely perceive the soft velvet of my headboard to my left.

The small air purifier that my partner has running all the time is a gentle calming white noise (it could be pink noise, or another colour of noise, I’m not completely clear on what makes a noise a colour category, and I’m writing right now so won’t go off to research frequencies, and sound, and who got to name the noises and why…not until later, if I remember).

My partner is breathing quietly and I wish I was sleeping. Sometimes they snore and if I’m in overwhelm-mode it makes it hard to sleep.

My phone clock reads 4am.

I’m awake because my new tattoo, which I declared ‘healed’ just last night, is itchy. I got up, washed it with unscented soap and water, moisturized it, and it feels a little better. I know the itching sensation is my body healing itself. I remember this sensation was the reason I said I’d never get another tattoo after my first.

But because I’ve had a tattoo before I know that this irritation…it’s temporary. It gives me time to sit with bodily discomfort that I’ve chosen. So many of the aches, pains and distress of this vessel I’m in…so much of it is un-chosen.

I’ve had chronic pain ever since I can remember. At three years old the searing hot pain in my legs would keep me up crying all night, and my mother would stay up with me, rubbing my legs, soothing me though no doubt she wished she could be sleeping. I remember getting a heating pad that I learned to use at about age five so that I wouldn’t always have to wake her up. I remember the sweet relief when I was 8 years old and finally allowed to take children’s Tylenol for the pain. I remember it made sleepovers difficult. I very clearly remember going to my friend Ara’s (I still love this name), and her mother was a nurse and she was so gentle and caring when I woke up crying in the night.

That pain has continued my whole life through, though ibuprofen has helped, and if it medicate myself before the pain gets to searing hot, sometimes it doesn’t escalate.

The doctors never could figure out what it was…is…and I don’t talk about it with them anymore. It’s a friend-pain. A familiar companion on my journey.

Occasionally I’ll encounter new pains. They are like strangers. Some of them stick around to be familiar companions. (I can’t sleep lying in my back because if I do my spine sinks, and when I roll over the pain of my spine relocating is nearly incapacitating. That one has been around since childhood too so I know how not to invoke it for the most part.)

Right now in the dark I can feel the familiar buzzing and twitching that happens in my limbs. I try not to focus on it too often. Sometimes it keeps me up.

I move my right wrist, it cracks. I write on my phone (thank goodness for my phone) with a single finger. I am so quick, but it winds up the muscles in my wrist. During the day I do stretching exercises to keep both my wrists limber.

I was a drummer from age 13 onwards, and though I rarely drum now, my forearms are very strong, which makes holding a phone and typing one of the easy things for my body to do.

What was the prompt? Pay attention to my outer-space?

Things outside always lead me in. The sound of my own breathing is soft. I breathe softly because the sound of breathing can be irritating to me. Even my own. I try to love the sound. I’ve tried. But I found it easier as I was growing up to breathe so quietly that I can’t even hear it. It also helped with my chronic cough. Which I’ve had for about 35 years. (Exactly 35 years this year. It began on the first day of grade 5. Suddenly. Seemingly out of nowhere. And I’ve gone through the gamut of testing, and it has never really been…figured out. I have a diagnosis of ‘stress-induced asthma’ but it feels like a description like my vasovagal syncope, which my friend and I laughed about this week. I called it a “beautiful name for a villain”.)

Ah. I’m inside again.

I didn’t mean for this to be an exploration of my pain-friends. I like that about writing without a specific intent. It leads me places I didn’t know I needed to go.

My arm isn’t itchy anymore, but now my head is starting to ache a bit. My eyes likely want to go back to sleep. But writing at this time of night is so soothing, and grateful for it. It made me forget the itch temporarily.

I’m reminded that though my pains (like the one that exists in my right eye, right now) they tend to be visitors that come and go. The ones that are constant, like my shoulder pain, they blend into the background. I’m grateful for my body’s ability to quiet the pain signals, even though they are always there. And I’m grateful that most of my pains are calmed by ibuprofen and acetaminophen.

The one time my doctor gave me fentanyl, I was giving birth to my youngest child, and I asked for laughing gas, and the tank wasn’t working…the experience of being on fentanyl was so awful, it was as if my body’s ability to manage its own pain was completely over-ridden, and the pain became excruciating. Plus I was high. Which I don’t enjoy. Being in control of my mind, my body…those things are essential to managing my own pain and existence. But I know that, and I guess I’m grateful for that momentary experience.

My tattoo artist said that pain management during tattooing seemed to be an autistic superpower that they’d observed in their autist clients. I wonder what that is about. I do feel, and have felt that my ability to manage pain and discomfort in my life has been a superpower. Maybe that’s the inside thing. The ability to go inside when the outside is too much.

I don’t know. It’s 4:42am.

I’m going to try to go back to sleep. I feel soothed.

I hope your Thursday has moments of calm if you need them.

Heart,

Wake

(I took this picture at the excitement of peaches ripening in my neighbourhood)