Relinquish

If I could I'd fold myself away like a card table

A concertina or a Murphy bed, I would

But I wasn't made that way 

-Oh my God, Whatever, Ryan Adams

And behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed. 

Matthew 8:2-3

There is an intense isolation in chronic pain.

I don’t know about you, but it’s important to me to be understood—not just in matters of my various physical conditions. I long to make sense to people, probably because I rarely make sense to myself! If others can make sense of me, then perhaps I’m not such a jumble of a person. If you understand me, maybe I can understand myself more. When I don’t feel heard, I feel out of sorts, out of touch. I’m guessing that we all have these kinds of feelings and reactions when others don’t “get” us. 

So when we add an invisible chronic pain condition to the mix, it gets complicated. You can’t see any evidence of how I feel. You can’t see the fibromyalgia “cape of pain” across my upper back and shoulders, you can’t see how all my muscles and joints fees inflamed. Even my skin feels on fire sometimes. You can’t see the lack of sleep due to being so damn uncomfortable, how I lay awake into the wee hours due to body-wide aches, despite taking pain medication or rubbing essential oils into my skin or turning off electronics an hour before bed time, or any of the other myriad of fixes for insomnia I’ve tried. You can’t see the monthly cramps that pierce my pelvis like a knife, bending me in half and making me sick to my stomach. 

How do I reconcile my predilection for being understood without much fuss with having unseen physical conditions? Now, the fear of not being believed is one I struggle with on a daily basis, let alone merely being understood. I’m beginning to realize I’m asking a lot when I ask others to understand me these days! I’m asking you to believe something you can’t see, after all. I’m asking you, in some sense, to step into my shoes, imagine yourself in my place on my couch, in the line at the pharmacy, filling out paperwork at the doctor’s office. 

It’s very easy to start feel like I’m invisible. Like it’s not just my fibromyalgia that is unseen. Like if you can’t see my pain, you can’t see me. It’s easy to assume I’m merely the extent of my pain, of what I’m feeling. It’s a battle to counter these feelings, let me tell you. Especially when I can’t always rely on the mirror of others to help me figure things out. If others don’t believe me, maybe I’m making this stuff up. Maybe it’s all my head. Maybe my pain isn’t as serious as I think it is. Maybe I don’t need to rest as much as I think. But then I calm down and think about the last 4 years or so, and remember. I remember the aches and the struggles and the efforts to figure it out. I remember the suffered relationships, the cutting back of activities, the many lessons of learning to communicate well.

These things are slowly teaching me, though, to relinquish my desires to be understood. Because that’s actually not the most important thing. It’s not even attainable! Even if I didn’t have fibro, you still couldn’t understand me completely. You still would have to take my word on how I feel. I still would have to figure out how to own my feelings and responses and choices without the approval or the opinion of others. So it will always be difficult. And even though I feel alone and invisible sometimes on my worst days, I know the people around do see me. My awe-inspiring husband believes me and takes care of me and takes on so many responsibilities out of love and joy and a desire to help me. He believes me more than I believe myself often. The friendships and relationships I have became so much closer, more honed because things have changed.

And not only by my husband and family and friends and co-workers. The One who saw and touched the ill and those on the outskirts sees me, too. He dignified the existence of the invisible and untouchable ones by physically touching them. He recognized the powerless and their situations, and saw them. Wherever we are at in our lives, we can be bold because Jesus sees us. He has compassion on us, He is waiting to heal us. Let us not fold ourselves away in our pain and our circumstances, but be free to kneel before Jesus and say, “If you will.”