touché, baby

no seriously

Some version of the phrase What you love, you mention exists. And maybe they have no passion for impressionist painter Mary Cassatt or Golden Age super hero comic covers or Pusheen the cat. But you mentioned them, you made a little speech and maybe feel mildly embarrassed about having ranted about it for a bit long or bit much.

And really, they might not have any kind of passion for art or comics or stuffed animals, they don’t “get it.” But you think of Pusheen, and they think of you, and we are all connecting over entire oceans of self and faulty words, infinitely imperfect language and the inherent isolation of consciousness. Humanity makes symbols of our cluttered, decaying world with every breath.

It’s just a movie, just a toy, just a thing, but we are experts in patterns and understanding what a thing is not. Your mother covers your cut in a Spider-Man Band-Aid because it’s all you talk about at 7. Your uncle buys an entire gallon of green tea flavored ice cream despite the fact you are the only one that eats it. A friend buys you a shirt of a horror movie they themselves can’t watch.

Clumsy words and clumsy minds. The world would go on without ice cream or cartoon Band-Aids. And yet. And yet. We are experts in patterns and attempting to overcome the horrors of self, alone, and consciousness, continuing. 

It is not the thing itself. It is this, only this:

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.