Not Weakness: Navigating the Culture of Chronic Pain by Francesca Grossman is a solid addition to the health feminism literary canon that digs into experiences of chronic illness and chronic pain, and dismissal, bias, and neglect in healthcare. Grossman tells her own story as well as excerpts from 21 women she interviewed who experience chronic pain, elucidating on several topics of pain, the difficulties of living with it, the indignities of healthcare, and more.

In this book, Grossman follows her own questions and curiosity down rabbit holes—from the opioid crisis and pain medication to fatphobia in the healthcare space. The stories of dismissal, misdiagnosis, and straight-up medical neglect are painful as always. Grossman does an incredible job of showing the truth of living with chronic pain, from the difficulty of translating it for the people around you, to the doctors who don't think you're qualified to know your own medical history or diagnoses, to the doctors who see anxiety or a certain BMI and fail to look any further. 

Occasionally, Grossman's research can feel shallow, and the structure of her chapters can start to turn in on themselves, leaving the reader slightly lost. One example of this was her chapter on how the fear of opioid abuse and addiction has hurt people with chronic pain who are using drugs responsibly and are dependent without being addicted. This is a good question to explore and a necessary issue—I've seen firsthand how painful it is when you need a drug that is often abused—but by setting up a couple false binaries, Grossman lost me in some of the edges of her otherwise compelling arguments. A couple of the chapters were set up in this way, and knowing some of the research myself, I know Grossman could have dug deeper in a couple of places. Grossman acknowledges her small sample but still generalizes often in places where she could have instead dug deeper into other research.

Overall, this is a great addition to my list of books about chronic illness and pain. Grossman is honest, bold, and curious in her quest to understand chronic pain and why she and other sufferers have to deal with it this way. The most powerful point she makes in the book are about being open and honest with ourselves and our pain—not giving into it, but accepting it, rather than being engaged in constant battle or refusal to admit me suffer from chronic pain.

This article is...hilarious and also terrifying and also strangely on point at times. 

Sensibly, if the vast majority of people are stressed out by their workplace, the changes should be taking place in the company, not in the individual. Realistically, we know that’s not going to happen -- but the article also seems to address, in a sidelong fashion, why we aren’t even trying anymore.   

The article, which is about a book about de-stressing in the workplace, even addresses how to challenge yourself at work if you are not feeling challenged by your job, while not acknowledging how soul-destroying your job is designed to be and how we’ve been convinced that has to be the case. (This is also very obviously aimed at white-collar workers who have the kind of job where ennui leads to playing Tetris between tasks, but that’s a whole other problem with the structure of our culture I won’t go into right now.) 

And then at the very end of this article about how basically YOU need to work harder at being less stressed, you big FAILURE AT EMOTIONAL REGULATION, there’s this: 

Technology has reduced an entire office to a laptop, and many workplaces set up work stations in close proximity within an open office plan. As we battle overheard conversations and salient noise to focus on a problem — a new email or text message — we must stop what we’re doing before we’ve even had a chance to focus.

Technology strips communication of non-verbal cues and introduces ambiguity. In the past, a workplace would often serve a local community and be held accountable for the welfare of its workers. Today, there may be little common purpose shared between a company and its workforce. This can make a workplace feel more uncertain, threatening and less controllable, leading to chronic stress.

There’s the familiar dull refrain of “technology is ruining everything” but underlying that is a high level of awareness that our stress is caused by companies forcing employees into untenably high-stress environments. And yet the emphasis of the entire article and presumably of the entire book is that WE are responsible for fixing that as individuals by coping better. 

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a coworker about a series of articles designed to improve workplace efficiency.

Her: This is some great reading on how we can be more efficient at work! Me: If we are, do we get paid more? Her: What? Me: If I perform better, do I get paid more? Because it seems like this article is really about how to convince your employees to do more work for the same wages. Her: ...ooooooh wow. 

I can’t tell whether "companies suck” is a central thesis and the author is just very subtly going about it, or whether we’ve reached the point where we treat our employers as inevitable, inexplicable, unalterable gods. 

“Yes, companies are terrible sometimes, but what can you do? We are powerless before them. And really if we fail it’s our fault, because Company is great and provides for us. So work hard and maybe Company will smile on you!”