{"id":49,"date":"2019-11-05T07:37:40","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T14:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/painvalley.com\/?p=49"},"modified":"2020-03-04T20:06:04","modified_gmt":"2020-03-05T03:06:04","slug":"why-pain-affects-the-perception-of-our-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/?p=49","title":{"rendered":"Why Pain Affects the Perception of our Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Enlightening\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I used to have a very clear picture of my future.\u00a0 I saw myself in a nice house, accomplished in my job as a therapist and an author.\u00a0 I saw a couple children, saw myself running around after them and laughing.\u00a0 I saw a healthy, fun life, full of laughter and smiles. Two years ago that picture became fuzzy and, ultimately, disappeared. I am not trying to be over-dramatic and suggesting I don\u2019t have a future anymore, but the truth is, for many people living with chronic pain, the future is very fuzzy, if it can be seen at all.\u00a0 I feel like the longer I go without a reason for my pain, the dimmer the picture gets.\u00a0 The house is blurry, the job is very blurry and the children have disappeared from the picture altogether.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I think part of the reason for this phenomenon is that, even on a day to day basis our lives are a giant question mark.\u00a0 Will I have the energy to do x<\/i>?\u00a0 Will my pain meds help me or just knock me out?\u00a0 Can I get to the gym today?\u00a0 Will my mood be happy? Sad? Irritated?\u00a0 A lot of people think that everything is dependent on physical pain, but the truth is the emotional pain can sometimes be more overwhelming and devastating than even the physical.\u00a0 When you live with constant disappointment, your mood suffers.<\/p>\n

Sometimes just the fact that I have little to do is enough to make me, well, pissed.\u00a0 It is the reason that I try to get to acting class so that I can do<\/i> something and feel like I am participating in life.\u00a0 As someone living with a disability, I often feel like life is passing me by while I do little more than watch and fast forward through the commercials.<\/p>\n

What is even more sad is I have plenty of time to do things, like my freelance writing, but the difficulty comes not only in being able to sit to do my work, but getting my energy up to do that.\u00a0 As I am sitting here writing this I am bleary-eyed from exhaustion.\u00a0 What did I do today?\u00a0 I went to the pharmacy, went to get lunch for my nephew and wrote for maybe half an hour.\u00a0 Oh, and I straightened my hair.\u00a0 The littlest things literally zap my energy.\u00a0 What\u2019s harder to accept is the less I do the less I want to do.\u00a0 My brain keeps telling me I should<\/i> be writing the next great American novel, but my body fights with me when I have to do the simplest thing (well, the novel part is not that simple).<\/p>\n

So, the question becomes, what do we do about this?\u00a0 The serenity prayer says \u201cGrant me the serenity to accept the things I CANNOT change, the courage to change the things I CAN and the wisdom to know the difference.\u201d\u00a0 The difficulty comes in accepting the things we cannot change and knowing the difference.\u00a0 Try as I might, I cannot seem to change the fact that I am limited in what I can do, however, accepting it is difficult because I continue to want to CHANGE it.<\/p>\n

What can we change?\u00a0 Besides our attitudes, there is not much we can change.\u00a0 I mean, we can keep seeing our doctors and hoping for new answers and better procedures and medications, but I can\u2019t change the fact that I am in pain, nor the ability to do more than a few hours of activity at a time.\u00a0 The only thing I can change is my response to this, which is generally negative.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that is easier said than done because the voice in my head still continues to say \u201cBut people don\u2019t believe you\u201d or worse yet, \u201cBut you SHOULD be able to\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

I believe it was in an episode of Sex and the City that Carrie wrote \u201cWhy are we should-ing all over ourselves?\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a good question\u2026for another time.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of\u00a0\"Creative<\/a>\u00a0Kevin Dooley<\/a>\u00a0via\u00a0Compfight<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used to have a very clear picture of my future.\u00a0 I saw myself in a nice house, accomplished in my job as a therapist and an author.\u00a0 I saw a couple children, saw myself running around after them and laughing.\u00a0 I saw a healthy, fun life, full of laughter and smiles. Two years ago […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-arthritis","tag-dbtag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111,"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/painvalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}