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Last Updated on March 18, 2015 by melissanreynolds
There are a great many things those people in the lives of chronic pain and fatigue sufferers will never know.
- They’ll never know much harder it is to do those things that everyone else takes for granted.
- Staying up later
- Doing a little bit more exercise
- Some days, making dinner
- Cleaning the bathroom
- Having a baby and looking after that baby.
- How many days we spend miserable, not wanting to be awake, but knowing that going to bed won’t help.
- The extent of our pain. Sure, we tell them about the parts of our body that are screaming. But they won’t often hear about the stabbing pain in our knees or glutes when we do something routine like walk the dog. Or the pain across our back from holding our baby.
- How often we are so sore that we feel nauseas and/or dizzy.
- How often we feel like we are letting our partners/families/husbands/children down. EVERY day.
- How much further our bodies can keep going, despite feeling like we ought to be falling down already.
- How hard we try to regulate our emotions. Because that is hard with so much pain and exhaustion. Think about how grumpy they get when they’re tired, could they imagine being bone-tired AND knowing that they will not wake up feeling refreshed?
- The grief. How often we cry. Knowing no one can truly understand. Knowing how many people don’t believe it. How many people push aside your cry for them to understand the depths of your pain and fatigue. Knowing it’s every day. All day. And if you give in, if you falter, you make life that much worse for yourself.
Not knowing these things, no one will ever realise our resilience. How hard we fight. How much we deserve our moments of nice. But I know. And you know. All of you spoonies, all of you who push through chronic pain and fatigue, I know. We’re freakin’ awesome.
