Revisiting Pain and Painful Bodies

Perhaps I want to write more about hurting bodies than I do pain. And perhaps that is my first move. I call pain, pain; it is its own thing. But I think pain and a hurting body might be two separate things.

So first: Pain is awful. There's just no other way of putting it. And there's no way to describe pain itself. You can explain the sensation of the hurt: throbbing, aching, burning, stinging, stabbing. You can also describe what the pain does to you; fear, powerlessness, tears, despondency and, yes, certain kinds of pain can be pleasure (shout out to Trinity: link further down post). But I don't know how you actually describe pain. In one of their kindnesses to us, the body and the mind seem to unite such that you can't remember precisely in the same critical way the agonizing pain of, say, childbirth or an accident, though you know it was painful, that you screamed, that you cried, that you passed out, or whatever it is you know about your experience. That absence of recall is a kindness of the body, yes, but it also says something about the hard-to-graspness of pain.

The same is true of (comparatively) lower level chronic pain. You manage to live around it; you wait, perhaps afraid, for its return. Sometimes, you can't win; you withdraw. You take a couple of days or a couple of hours -- whatever. The thing is, though, you still can't describe to those who have no pain or, at least, none on a regular basis either the pain itself or the way it shapes you. Damn pain. But yes. Pain is its own thing. A force, a power, a twitch, scowl, grunt or cry. And no. We don't talk enough about it. Not in the disability studies world -- though Tobin Siebers has done some really cool work here. Not in the medical world -- pain management is only one part of the issue. And not in the blogosphere either.

Interestingly, though, I have been noticing lately a small blogging trend of posts that talk about the experience of trying to do something with/despite hurting body parts: arms, legs, heads, hips (I've written a number of these), and backs. I see these as different. Yes, a hurting body part is painful, but writing about something as specific as this is different from writing about pain itself. Perhaps because pain is unspeakable, people -- me included -- tend to write about the experience of hurting parts.

In all of these posts (my own included), I keep coming back to what I have begun to call the "bounded-ness" of hurting body parts (in honor of all wheelchair-bounded folk). The dominant trope is simply: I can't/didn't ... my 'x' hurts. A modified version would be "I had so much difficulty with 'y' because my 'a' was hurting." I find myself walking into an immovable wall of the association of pain and restriction/limits.

Before I go on, let me be clear. Yes, pain is a stopper. It is. But I think something else is going on here in these stories of hurting parts. And whatever that something is -- I'm going to have a shot at describing it -- seriously affects how the non-disabled public understands the life and experience of the disabled public.

Most of the posts look like this. The writer describes a hurting body part -- say a knee. It hurts a lot. It prevents the writer from doing what she wants -- where "it" is some combination of the knee itself (not functioning optimally) and the pain (her knee hurts when she tries to get it to function). She's done PT; she's had surgery; the thing still isn't working right. She imagines that this is what it is like to be disabled. I make no judgment about whether or not life with this knee rises to the level of a disability; I can see that in some cases it might, in others it might not. I have no right to express an opinion anyway.

My concern is with the construction of disability that arises from this experience. I want there to be a raft of writing, art, dance, theater, film that erases that "bounded-ness." That isn't to say that the limitations aren't real -- I won't be running (wheeled or footed) any marathons anytime soon; I do know that there are certain things that are just off limits to me. And, yes, some of them are pretty basic; I weep for those losses. But I do think that there is more to the experience of living with hurting bodies than the "can't." And I don't say that in the polly-anna, try harder, overcome way. I mean that in a deeply political and cultural way.

Disability, hurting body parts, and pain certainly have their associated "can'ts," but I don't see them as definitive of disabled life. The story of "can't" and "won't" is part of the narrative of boundedness. For far too many non-disabled folk, the hurt defines the disability and dominates the life. They can't imagine the pleasure in our lives -- in our pain, our hurting or not disabled bodies, or our assistive equipment; I love Kay Olson's post@thegimpparade on this. I now add Trin's post on pain and pleasure to my library of references.

The stories of the failure of people's body parts are deeply personal -- they show bloggers and readers at their most vulnerable and at their most compassionate -- but that hurt, that failure to function "normally" isn't all there is to the story. And I grow frustrated when I see them marked here and there in the blogosphere as narratives of disability. I walk a fine line here, given the number of posts I've written on the topic of my hurting, x, y, and z.... But it is time to say it again. Pain is disabling, but disability is more than than hurt, the impairment, and more even than the attempts to overcome the hurt. Dare I go so far as to say -- *disability* is the wind in your hair, the sun on your back, the fuck you, the acceptance, the culture, the art, the humour, the rebellion, the work, the pleasure, and, yes, the living in pain; this is living unbounded.