The Slow Way Newsletter: Where does it hurt?
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
Where does it hurt?
Yesterday I sat down in my neurologist’s office, a ritual I've been performing every two months for the past year and a half. She wanted to know how the new preventative medication has been working. I told her it’s been pretty good. I’ve had around two good weeks out of every month. One medium week, and one week that’s really bad. So we talked about what “really bad” means, and I admitted that I’ve been using all my monthly allotment of migraine medication up in those “bad” weeks. And in the other weeks, I use ibuprofen.
“Wait,” she said. “Why are you using ibuprofen on the good weeks?”
“Because the headaches aren’t as bad,” I said, as if it was obvious.
“I thought ‘good’ meant you didn’t have headaches those weeks.”
“Oh,” I said.
We sat and looked at each other for a bit. “You have headaches almost every day?”
“I do,” I said. “Almost every day.”
I’ll spare you from the conversation that followed. My point is simply this: Sometimes we aren’t honest about our pain, because pain happens to us in different ways. When it comes to my migraines there are Ibuprofen migraines, and hard-core-med migraines. There are walk-around-and-make-breakfast-and-pack-lunches migraines, and there are dark-room, can’t-walk, ice-pack-on-the-head migraines. I’ll take the former over the latter any day. But both are pain.
My neurologist was a little teensy bit annoyed with me for categorizing my pain like this. All along, every time I’ve visited her office, I haven’t really been communicating about the small, daily migraines, only the ones that knock me out. She wanted to know about all of them. To her, pain is pain, and she’s trying to help me live without pain, period.
I felt a little sheepish leaving the doctor’s office. Why had I never communicated about those smaller headaches? Why didn’t they count to me? And why did I assume that ibuprofen was just a necessary part of my daily life?
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This week I sent some of a writing project I’ve been working on to my friend Erin Lane. She and Cara Meredith are two dear friends who show up for me every month to talk about writing, share our work, and push each other creatively. Erin’s been helping me think through some ideas and sort them into one coherent Big Idea.
One of the suggestions she made for me was to think through who my reader actually is, what moves them, what they value. And she asked me to consider my readers’ places of pain.
So I started thinking about you. And thinking about me. I made lists. I drew Venn diagrams. I bullet pointed. I wrote down words like grief, disability, anxiety, abandonment, injustice, illness, death, unexpected suffering, financial insecurity, loss of faith community, and failures of relationship. I thought about those of us who experienced very real pain during the 2016 election, and how my heart beats faster even now if I need to log in to Facebook because of how that election has brought real division and made discourse feel extra hard and scary.
Pain looks different. Some things on that list I made may speak to you. Some may not. Some may be loud. Some may be pain that sends you straight into your metaphorical bed. Some pain we walk around with every day, and we have our ways of dealing with it. Turning the podcasts louder so we don’t think about it, or reaching for the chocolate, the wine, the netflix.
What is your pain? If you had to list the emotional, social, and physical suffering you carry with you everyday, what would you list? Maybe there is loss or grief in your body that leads all the way back to your childhood. It’s a string that itches from time to time, but if you pick it up and start pulling, it just might unravel your life.
What I’m trying to say is that sometimes ibuprofen makes the pain go away for long enough to get through your morning, but eventually, if you take it every day, it rots out your liver. And that’s just the truth of it.
What if you pull the string, friend?
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I’ve been reading Rachel Held Evans’ new and final book Wholehearted Faith (she passed away while working on it in 2019), and yesterday in the waiting room of that very doctor’s appointment I read these words in her first chapter:
“To love oneself is not synonymous with self-obsession or narcissism---or perhaps it's better to say that to love oneself well is not those things. To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. . . To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person.”
I think we could add on to that, To love oneself well means not to diminish one’s own pain, whether it’s minor or major. But to cultivate a clear-eyed vision for our pain, so we can begin to live into wholehearted healing.
So, where does it hurt? And for how long? And what is it like to live with that pain? And what does it mean to be honest with yourself about your pain, whether it’s something you’ve carried all your life, or for this past season, or maybe it's something completely new? Your pain is important, because it’s telling you that something hasn’t healed yet.
If we want to be people who believe in healing, in the hope that all things will be made new, then we can learn to love ourselves well by being honest with ourselves and one another. There is always pain underneath the pain. But little by little---a bit of oxygen, a bit of light---healing is possible.
a slow practice
My friend Erin calls them “pain points” and that phrase has made me think about the body, and how we carry our pain.
Let’s draw a big body, taking up all 12 inches of a piece a paper. (Think: Keith Haring style.) This body is you. This body carries the hurts of a lifetime inside it. It carries the fight you can’t forget from childhood, the abuse, the doubt you had in yourself. The thing your mother said. It carries the time time the cool girls pushed your backpack onto the floor and told you to find another table. It carries the first time you were rejected by someone you trusted. It carries the breakups, the failures, the lies you told, the people you hurt. It carries the ugly things you said and that were said about you. It carries the friendships you let drift away, and the friends who let you go. It carries the physical pain. Scars that remember falls on the sidewalk in your childhood, and tight ropey muscles holding years of desk jobs or years of anxiety. Your belly may bear the marks of pregnancy, or it may not, and that reality may break your heart. This body carries the relationships that were taken away, the people you loved and needed who were taken away.
This is your body. Sit with the picture you’ve drawn for a while. Where is the pain in your body? Maybe you can circle the places where you carry pain on a daily basis. Your stomach, your back, your neck, your feet. In those places where you feel your actual physical pain, can you write the names or moments of trauma, loss, or sorrow that you hold in those places? Take your time. Sit with each event or memory. Pray through what that experience was like for you.
When you’re ready you can close by praying, along with Sarah Bessey from her Benediction prayer in the collection A Rhythm of Prayer: “Teach us to pray, God, as you have always / Welcomed us to pray: / fully human, fully yours, fully held, / And fully loved.”
Now take that picture of your body and write those words along the top, or across the picture, or along the edges: Fully human, fully yours, fully held, and fully loved.