For the last two years or so I’ve been in pain and now, two weeks post surgery, the pain has become noticeable by virtue of its absence.

Pre-surgery I would have said that there were times when I was not in pain, but now that I actually remember what being pain-free feels like, what was true is that there were times in the past two years when the pain just formed the background. One the scale of one to ten, my pain never really went below a “two.” I just got so used to it that it no longer registered as pain.

The thing about that is that my body knew better than my consciousness. I recognize that now, not only because I am actually pain free, but because suddenly a whole raft of behaviours no longer have any appeal.

Just one example: TV. I don’t actually own a TV but I do have the internet and so I can watch some shows online. For the last couple of years I have watched a whole range of dramas, mostly crime dramas. I would go to work and come home exhausted. On days when I didn’t have to go straight to bed (when the pain got above a “five” on the ten-point scale), or couldn’t read (need energy to think), I watched TV or other vids on the internet. When I came home from the hospital this last time, I couldn’t leave the house and I wasn’t yet mentally composed enough to read, so I started to watch one of the shows I hadn’t seen yet. And I couldn’t do it.

I started to watch it but the cruelty of it, the crime component of the drama, was suddenly so obvious, so egregious, that I couldn’t bear to attend to it. It turned out that nearly everything I watched so assiduously pre-surgery struck me the same way. I erased it all.

Depictions of human cruelty and their punishment was how I handled chronic pain. There is something very important about that, I think.

It made me wonder about other behaviours of mine and other situations that are painful, even if in a more emotional sense than the physicality of my recent distress. It occurs to me to question myself about how I was able to sustain myself in a job I loathed. What things did I do to make that cruelty possible? Were the crime dramas part of that pain? What about tolerating someone who speaks garbage and does it continuously? How do I make it possible to tolerate that person? Perhaps more importantly, why do I do it?

Partly I compensate for pain because sometimes pain is simply unavoidable and pain is something for which there is always a cost that must be paid. Socially, for example, one must follow politeness codes if one wants politeness codes applied to one’s own existence. So I don’t scream “shut the fuck up” because I don’t want to be screamed at by someone else. That seems to me to be a sensible give-and-take and worth the cost of ignoring a boor or a fool. But there is a difference between that and the continual coping-behaviours that become habit, especially when the pain is actually optional.

Now my physical pain wasn’t an option easily fixed, but other sorts are. I could have, for example, quit that job far sooner than I did. I could avoid people with verbal diarrhea more than I do. I could pay more attention to the ease and resilience my body craves and be more discerning about situations that require greater than average attention to politeness codes.

The thing about chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, is that coping with it seems to undermine one’s capacity to see past it, and therefore to get out from under the situation causing it. Nasty that.

The thing about being pain free is that I rather like it. In fact I like it so much that I might try to cultivate a kind of psychic pain free state more often now that I am physically pain free. Good idea don’t you think? I do think that achieving such a goal is going to require me to pay attention to how I behave and why. That might be a bit difficult, but it will probably have interesting results and so be worth the effort. Yes. Worth a try anyway.