pain | Sleep is for the Weak

Writing Workshop: Have, Am, Will

Posted by Josie on Feb 10, 2011 in Creative Writing, Me, Writing, Writing Workshop | 35 comments

There have been four times in my life when I genuinely thought I was going to break. I don’t mean just bad days, I have talked about getting through them before, I mean when you feel like you are actually going to die, or want to, when just the thought of keeping going one more minute seems physically impossible. It feels like your heart will stop, your brain will shut down, just through sheer, overwhelming emotional pain. If you’re lucky, you get through it. If you’re not, well, I guess you probably have a breakdown. I don’t know. Lucky enough I’ve always got through.

Three of those times have been in the last year, and Tuesday was one of them.

I could write in great detail about why, but I won’t. All you need to know is that after a really, really difficult couple of days, walking Kai back from nursery, it was like something snapped. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear. It was like my ears had filled with water, or I was standing in a wind tunnel. I’m honestly not entirely sure how I stayed upright.

All I could say to myself was “Just get home. Just get home” over and over, trying to make my body breathe and put one foot in front of the other. And get home I did. And then I let myself cry.

Do we have an emotional limit? I think we do. At least, I think we have a point at which we can be taken TO, but not over. I felt like I was there.

It did not go, that feeling. It stayed with me all day, rising and falling with the demands of my afternoon. Because I’m a mother, aren’t I? And that doesn’t stop. An automatic pilot making sandwiches and building train tracks as I tried to breathe. I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I couldn’t remember who I was. Oh no. That’s right. I do know these things. And so another minute passed. An another. I was still alive. I wasn’t quite sure how, wrapped in this huge, ice cold, weighty shadow, that seemed to have attached itself to my bones and my skin.

At some point, when Kai was playing, I picked up a tangle of wool from a bag at the side of sofa. Now, I’m usually a good knitter and ball my wool when it arrives, but here I had been too eager, knitting straight from the skein, leaving it, inevitably, when I’d finished, a tangled bird’s nest of knotted yarn. And with the wind still strong in my ears and my hands shaking and shaking, I found the loose end and began to untangle it, winding it into a neat ball. I don’t remember why.

I chased each loop and knot with my fingers, passing the bright yarn up and over and round, through each tangled tunnel and hole, round and round and round, breaking off to wipe Kai’s nose, or try and sooth his temper, or fetch a snack, but over and over I returned to my mess.

For a while there were no thought, but after a while it became like a set of rosary beads. Each turn and twist a new thought, a new internal cry. I chased my paralysing worry about Kai through knotted loops; I chased my crushing guilt at wanting to be happy and how that seems, in itself, determined to cause pain; I chased my exhausted effort to do the right thing, over and over, and internally screamed at the fact that it still seems to never be good enough, to hurt and rebound ineffectively, however hard I try. Turn and unloop and unknot and pull and wind and wind some more. Please let me cope. I am not coping. I have to cope. Pull and unknot and wind again.

And somehow the day passed.

I put a tired and fragile boy to bed. I remembered to eat. I talked quietly on the phone and was made to smile. And I wound my ball of wool until, at last, hours and hours after I had begun, I came to the end of it, at which point I put it down, without looking at it, and went to bed.

Coming down in the morning, it was the first thing I saw. Wound tight, and neatly; it’s strands criss-crossing in rainbow stripes. And nothing had magically changed, and nothing suddenly made sense, but I realised I was still here, I was still together, and I hadn’t broken. So I went to put the kettle on and had a better day.

I have coped. I am coping. I will cope.

Now it’s your turn. What triplet did you use to look back, look at where you are, and look forward?

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the Linky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) If you have the time it would be great if you could try and show your support to other participants by reading and commenting on at least two other entries.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve got another whole week to take part and enter your link so there’s plenty of time. Don’t forget that anyone can take part! Our next workshop will be in two week’s time, so I hope to see you back soon.

(I’ve used a free linky thingy today while I sort out my subscription to McLinky tools – grr. Don’t panic that old Writing Workshop McLinkys have disappeared – they shall be back soon)

In which I give you a biology lesson and you either go “Ooh! That’s interesting!” or fall asleep.

Posted by Josie on Sep 28, 2010 in Me | 17 comments

Did you know that emotional stress hurts? I mean, actually really fricking painfully hurt? Well, it does me anyway. And because I am currently lying in bed, in too much pain to sleep, I thought I’d tell you why…

I have Fibromyalgia. Regular readers of this blog will know that already, but I don’t tend to talk about it all that often so maybe you don’t. I started getting symptoms when I was really little, maybe 8? ‘Growing pains’ we would call it or ‘a touch of the flu’, although growing pains don’t normally put you on crutches, and the intense fatigue would wipe me out for weeks and months at a time. My body’s always had a rather odd way of working sometimes, having inexplicable sensory and physical reactions to things. It left me very ill for most of teens and in a wheelchair for most of twenties, before I really leant to understand the way it worked and how to manage it. Anyway. It’s been a lot better for the last few years and I’ve finally got a handle on it, but it does like to come and bite me on the ass from time to time.

Like now. Because I’m stressed, see? And Fibro bodies don’t really process stress in the same way as healthy bodies.

Fibromyalgia is the diagnosis I received in the end and current research into the illness and the things being discovered about the role of biochemicals in Fibromyalgia is beginning to shed some light on what it is exactly that is different about the way my body works.

Most people tend to think of Fibromyalgia as a bit like arthritis, or a bit like MS, but although it sometimes presents a bit like both, it’s actually something quite different.

Fibromyalgia is a nervous system malfunction, more specifically a biochemical malfunction. Now, biochemicals are the things in your body known as “infomational substances” – that is, the substances that convey information from one part of your body to another. This includes exciting things like hormones, neurotransmitters, neuromodulators and other things with fancy names. They affect your entire body and your brain, almost every aspect of the way your body functions, and in Fibromylagia it’s the way these informational substances are balanced and used that causes the problems. Most significantly in Fibromyalgia, it seems to be the biochemicals used to process pain and sensory stimulation that are most out of whack. That means lots of OWWWWs. Lots of them.

Now there’s LOADS of examples I could give here – Fibromyalgia is a complicated disease with a multitude of symptoms, but it’s the way it makes your body respond to STRESS that has always been the most pervasive for me.

I could never understand why emotional and physical stress made me so ill, and by ‘stress’ I mean anything that put my body under pressure. Intense emotions, sensory stimulation, physical injury… For a long time it was assumed that the ‘pain’ I reported to feel was psychosomatic. And I actually believed it for a while. Despite being in more pain than even morphine drips could keep under control at times, I was told it so often I actually believed for a while that I was going mad. That’s pretty hard when you’re twelve, I can tell you. What took years and years to realise was that my body wasn’t responding psychologically to stress, it was genuinely responding physically.

We all know that external stresses causes the body to react in a specific, physical way. Certain hormones and chemicals are released, like adrenaline and cortisol and lots of others with names I can’t remember. In layman’s terms, stress, of any kind, can cause a ‘fight or flight’ response, a way of priming your body for the appropriate action. Emotional stress may leave us shaky and tired as we recover from shock, physical stress like really bright light will make us squint, or hurting ourselves will produce pain messages that make us stop and rest while we heal. It’s all the body’s way of regaining balance.

In really chronically stressed people, the effects can last a while, but in generally healthy people, once the stress is removed, the chemical messages adjust themselves and things return to normal. The problem in Fibromyalgia seems to be that that doesn’t happen. You know when you have a sudden fright and your muscles tense? Well, imagine that once the fright passes your muscles stay tensed and won’t release. Imagine that the way looking into a bright light makes your eyes hurt continues even when you’re in a dark room. And imagine that your body keeps being told it is hurting, even when there’s absolutely nothing to cause the pain.

That’s pretty much what happens with Fibromylagia. And levels of these stress chemicals just build up and up. They leave you exhausted, unable to think clearly, even SEE clearly sometimes. They cause pain in your muscles and in your joints, leaving them tense and stiff. Every tiny new stress creates a whole new cascade of chemical reactions that cause even more imbalance. Just being ill and in pain itself is a huge stress. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. That’s what happens in a flare-up. And that cycle can last months, even years in my case, before it slowly settles down again.

(You still awake? Wow, you’re doing well. Don’t worry, nearly finished now. Painkillers kicking in at last…)

So stress, not so good for me. Now generally I can manage the little stresses these days. My sensitivity to light and noise and physical stress is LOADS better. I do the right things to keep my body in balance and I avoid those big cascade reactions and that horrible trapped cycle of stress leading to pain leading to more stress leading to more pain.

But emotional stress? The really big kind? Yep, that still clobbers me.

You can’t take a break from emotional stress. It’s there all the time. It’s not fixed by sleep or by taking it easy for few days. Even a short period of really acute emotional stress and it’s all too easy for my body to start getting in trouble very quickly.

I’m pretty emotionally stressed just now. And the biochemical response that it’s causing is leaving me shattered and in a lot of pain. It’s hard to deal with that as well as everything else just now, but generally it’s more of an inconvenience than anything else. I get ANNOYED! I’m frustrated just now. Just at the time I need to be thinking clearly, making plans and taking control, my body is letting me down again. I haven’t got time for pain or a body that wants to just sleep all day.

Anyway. It’ll pass. I’m savvy enough now to not fall into the traps of things that make it worse. I’ve just got to keep my head above water and tread it out.

But still. Pretty shitty huh?

Thanks for listening.

Night night x