Last night, I got to see my favorite band of all time, @pinkshiftbites , for the second time ever, and the first time headlining their own tour. It took me a day to process it emotionally, but all I can think about is how much better I’m doing since last I saw them. This feels a little more emotionally vulnerable than I want to share on social media with people I know irl, so tumblr it is. (Minus the select few I trust with this, y’all know who you are.)
August 2024, the tail end of the worst period of my life. My pain levels were a constant 5-8 (on the infamous 1-10 scale), with nothing working to make it better. The nerve pain in my arms had started going haywire since May, and we were running out of options to try and help. I don’t think I want to die, but I know I didn’t want to actively be alive through this.
Pinkshift was my first true foray into punk, and it ended up being my life raft as I went through everything. Last August I jokingly called myself a baby punk, and I didn’t realize what an amazing community I was gonna find.
Anyways. They were the first opener for a concert. My arms were doing so bad, I didn’t think I could physically handle standing for the whole concert (and again. My legs work fine. The nerve pain in my arms was so severe that I struggled to handle the pressure of my arms pressing against my upper torso. I almost always had to sit with pillows or a blanket to rest my arms against as a cushion.) They were amazing, but we immediately went home after their 6-song set because my body couldn’t handle much more.
Fast forward to now, November 2025. Rather than lightly moshing for half a song, I moshed for almost the entire show, after going to the grandson concert just two days before. Yes, I still had to manage my pain and give myself breaks. And yes, I had to dip out when it got too intense because the battery pack implanted above my hip is still healing and easily bruised. But I can do it! Because I’m a fucking cyborg. Because medical advancements are so amazing that the one thing that consistently worked for me, electrical stimulation to block the pain signal to the brain, is now going on in my body 24/7.
This is really long and rambling, but I can’t express enough how much their music means to me. It became a healthy, therapist-approved (!!!) outlet for all of the rage and helplessness I felt in dealing with my chronic pain, and my body constantly betraying me. And even though I’m still picking up the pieces, and healing is gonna be a long and slow process after years of hell (both physically, as my nerve pain slowly calms down, and emotionally as I deal with everything I went through) I’m better, in ways I never could have imagined back last August. And hell, their newest album mirrors the changes in my life eerily well- still angry, still hurting, but healing. Not linearly, but slowly and steadily.
If you read all this, congrats, listen to pinkshift, and feel free to ask me more about what the heck I mean by being a cyborg 💖



















