Life with chronic pain isn’t a life, Jim, not as we know it.
It’s a daily negotiation between a spirit as willing as a cocker spaniel puppy, and a body you’d overlook in a scrapyard. You yearn to walk, to dance, to stand for longer than a minute before being overcome with pain and fatigue. Instead, you sit and watch everyone else living the life you used to have and are hit by a tsunami of anger and loss.
It’s not a life, Jim, not as we know it.
It’s about weighing up whether we can clean the toilet and have the energy left to read a book.
It’s about knowing that cutting out fabric to make masks will leave you with knives in your elbows and shoulders and neck and back but you do it anyway because… because you have to do something. Because you can no longer put up with a beige life, a life lived in a padded cell where tomorrow is just the same as today, or even worse.
It’s not a life, Jim, not as we know it.
It’s about being no longer able to embroider or knit or crochet or paint or hold a physical book to read.
It’s about a phone call wearing you out for a day or more.
It’s about lying down for at least an hour after a shower and remembering when you’d have one every morning before work.
It’s not a life, Jim, not as we know it.
But it’s also about sitting in the garden and listening to the birds, it’s hearing the hedgehogs snuffle at night through an open window.
It’s about all the friends who live on your phone and check in on you daily.
It’s about listening to the perfect song, the one that brings tears of joy and touches your heart still.
It’s about trying to help others, many of who are far worse off than yourself.
It IS a life. And today I celebrate still being here to tell you about it.