Joy & Misery

by Jacqui Germain

friend: have you been having any other symptoms?

Sympathy has an expiration date. 

If you’re hurting because you broke your leg, people can sympathize with you, because there’s an end-date. Eventually your leg will heal and you’ll be okay again. People will coo and coddle and bring you chocolates and sign your cast because they know that’s emotional labor that they will only have to perform temporarily. 

But if you have a chronic condition that causes you daily pain, after awhile, people get annoyed with having to deal with you. They ask you what’s wrong, and when you reply with the same thing that was wrong last week, or the week before, or the month before, you eventually get an incredulous, “Still?” 

Or maybe they’re not that overt. Maybe instead they go, “Oh, just that. Okay.” As if today’s pain should somehow be fine for them to ignore because it’s nothing new. No need to worry: it’s just the same old same old. 

Let me tell you: Pain never gets easy to handle. It’s not like people with chronic pain develop an immunity to it, or that we stop feeling it. Sure, some of us get better at ignoring it, or better at living around it, but honestly? Most of us just get better at hiding it, because we get tired of feeling like an emotional burden to everyone around us.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re not hurting, and it sort of sucks that long-term pain, in addition to all the other fun things it entails, also eventually comes with a revoked right to be sympathized with, or even just treated like something other than a whiny attention-grabbing faker (or worse: a drug-seeker).

Chronic pain is real. And it sucks. And one of the worst parts about it is knowing it’s never going to end.