#40: Sally Rooney and Chronic Pain

26 September 2023

So, immediately (literally 2 days after) I got home from my very last tour event, I got a back pain flare up. I had never had one before, and for the first few days, it was almost kind of funny. Like, "oh, look at me, I turned 30 and now my whole back is giving out." Like, "Oh no, I come home from book tour and my body just immediately dissolves." Like groaning for effect as suddenly the bottom tupperware drawer felt about a million miles away. Day 3 or 4, particularly after spending the entirety of those days either fully in a hot bath, wrapped in a heating pad, or smelling like menthol it was...substantially less funny. After a week, I went to the doctor, naturally on the day when my pain was the lowest it had been since it started. He made me do a few of those very basic tests that seem easy when your entire back isn't seized up (touch your toes! lift your leg!), asked if I was experiencing numbing and tingling, and prescribed me physical therapy.

I've been going, faithfully, twice a week for the last month. I kind of like it in equal measures as I am embarrassed by it: me and a bunch of old ladies in a room together, sweating profusely as we very, very slowly raise an arm above our head for 3 sets of 10 or sit down and stand up from a bench for a minute at a time. It's kind of contemplative and peaceful, but then also you end up doing a lap around the room with a weight in one hand to practice carrying groceries and you are reminded that you're a 30 year old adult who, thanks to semi-persistent neglect of your physical health, cannot currently carry groceries in from your car without spending a few hours on the couch after with a knuckle dug into your back at a very specific angle. 

The sort-of official diagnosis is sciatica, which is annoying because it just means that my nerve is clamped somewhere along the line and therefore also means that the anti-inflammatories I usually rely on do absolutely nothing to touch the thing. I've had good days and bad days in the last month, times when I don't even really remember that I have a thing going on with my back, and others, like this weekend, when I cry in my bedroom with my pants around my ankles because it feels ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE to hinge at the hips, grab my pants and pull them (and my whole torso) back up. Flare ups are, as of now, mostly unpredictable, and there's no adjustment or quick fix I've been able to find that makes it better, other than finding a position that doesn't hurt and moving as little as possible. Unfortunately, that usually means that it will hurt worse when you do move, but well. We live in the short term. 

This is not my first chronic pain rodeo--long-time readers may remember sometime around 2018, I wrote a letter here about getting surgery for "mystery pains." I don't know if I've ever named them but I certainly talk about it enough--I had/have endometriosis, and that surgery I had was a laparoscopy to remove all the growths or whatever they call them that were inflamed and irritated and made me feel, at completely random but extremely frequent intervals, like someone was pulling my insides taut with thread made of fire. That surgery, just over 5 years ago now, fixed a problem that for nearly two years felt so overwhelming that I thought it would shape my entire life. Modern medicine, a truly wild miracle except for all the times and places in which it is not. 

I will say that there is something about endometriosis pain that makes it feel kind of...mystical? Granted, I was in divinity school at the time and so everything was feeling mystical and cotton-wool-parting-y and like it fit into a grand design, and I was reading a lot of medieval mysticism, which I think is actually partially about dealing with the fact that we have bodies and that those bodies are supremely fallible and distracting. But still, I want to say there was also just something about the quality of that pain and how it came that sciatica, a word that makes me want to pronounce it in a old-man Chicago-accent, a la Nick Kroll, and comes quite predictably when I move my body in certain ways, simply does not give you. The endometriosis pain comes on you like a thunderclap, and when it hits, it's all you can do to white-knuckle your way through it, your whole self a silk scarf passed through a white-hot ring and when it passes you are very alive to your own body and the fact that everything you think you are is actually just a little ghost in complete thrall to that body and to the fact that there are mysteries without and within your body that are beyond your comprehension. 

All this leads me to Sally Rooney. I've read all her books, and I quite like them--they sit really nicely at this intersection of braininess and horniness and self-delusion that characterized...a lot of my 20s, and probably all 11 months of my 30s that I've lived through so far, although I do like to think I'm too grown up for that.  Her first book, Conversations with Friends is about those really intense friendships you have in your early 20s, and also having an affair with an older man, and being really misunderstood by everyone, but it's also about having mystical experiences while you have undiagnosed endometriosis. The book has been out since 2017, and I kind of consider it un-spoilable, in which sense I mean yes, it does have a plot, but that's not where the pleasure of it lies, but anyways, consider yourself warned for spoilers here. 

Probably...¾ of the way through, as the threads of the text  are all being gathering up for an ending, the protagonist, Frances almost literally stumbles into a church in the midst of an endometriosis flare. The pain leads her to prayer, which she sort of realizes is fake or implausible because she doesn't really believe in an organizing principle like God, and then, in her head, in this prayer, she sort of argues against that. She loves people, which has to count for something, and then she gets very specific with it: can she say she loves her best friend, who tore up a story she wrote? or the man who was sleeping with her and now won't? can she say she loves bad people? and she recognizes that as unhelpful, and pulls herself up by it in thinking about the smallest possible thing: the pew she is sitting on, and how it was made by people, and so was everything in that church, even the machine made things, and the clothes on her back, and then even the thoughts in her head, the language she thinks them in--can she really be said to have a self? 

"Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes. When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed." 

Reading this now is honestly almost embarrassing. I've had nearly these same thoughts, almost begging to be set free from my own body and selfhood and also realizing in a very real and alarming way that this flare of pain is just how some people exist and move through the world all the time, and what else should we want but to free them and ourselves from that, even though we are imperfect and embarrassing. We love ourselves, despite the manifold flaws in ourselves we are awake to, we want our own suffering to end; what then but to love others, even though we see in them their flaws and slights against us and want their suffering to end. What is left for us but to catalog our sins and ask for deliverance anyways?

I've been listening to back-catalog episodes of the Know Your Enemy podcast, mostly because of a bad experience with a guy from the Heritage Foundation a few months ago, but I think my favorite episode so far has been less about conservatism and more about articulating the morals and ethics the two hosts, Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman bring into it, an episode called "How to be Depressed." You should listen to it, regardless, but in it, they talk about building a society that understands and is built around human frailty. We are not infallible, or even all that strong, and that should be an organizing principle in how we structure our society. Sometimes you have sciatica and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps becomes (even more) impossible, and shouldn't we, as people who can also feel pain and suffer and hurt, want a society in which you might suffer, but your whole entire life won't be ruined because of it? Leaning wolfishly into a survival of the fittest mentality anywhere just means that you're ensuring your own downfall at some point, because sometimes your back freezes up or the finger of endometriosis comes in and sweeps every thought out of your brain but a messily articulated plea for no one, least of all yourself, to ever feel this way again. And there's not much we can do about pain, writ large, but we can make it survivable, we can institute means of care and safety nets to cradle you when you need them. I also really love the way that Sitman, particularly, is honest about coming to some understanding of that politics through watching a friend struggle with homelessness and addiction and being terrified it would happen to him also, the little kernel of embarrassing selfishness that lies at the heart of so many of our best impulses. 

Anyways, I don't want to tell anyone else that their pain, by necessity, must be instructive, because fuck that, but what I will say is that to me, pain has been a way of focusing attention just as much as it is distracting and intrusive. Right now, it's keeping my ambulations small, it's turning my thoughts and attention back to the soft animal of my body after being a brain in a highly polished, very visible jar for a bit, but it's also, in a way that I think Rooney, through Frances, articulates kind of perfectly, turning those same thoughts outward, to other people in the world, even as they're passing through my own suffering to get there.