People start to heal the moment they are heard.
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“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
— Franz Kafka
“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
—
Hanya Yanagihara
Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.
I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.
That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.
I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.
My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”
He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.
Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.
I completely agree. Thank you for sharing this.
Psychosomatic symptoms are literally your body flipping random alarm switches just to get any alarm blaring because you’ve been ignoring the regular ones
November
November carries a strange sense of longing somewhere in the middle of being complete and disoriented
There are no reasons to light up the sky with lanterns and no reason to make your hours smell like butter and chocolate
But November has the essence of you on my chest after I’ve sneaked in to your house for the millionth time
November has us under the same blanket from the first night we spent together on your birthday. Your mother was mad and we were in love. This has my whispers and your smiles all tangled up under one big picture of a flashy neon sign that says forever
November has distance, between our bodies, physically over miles, when I am away, and inches between our fingers, when all we do is stare at each other, hungry and wanting, from across the table
November has no celebrations or art or even
But November has the sound of us crashing against each other, my hand under yours, goose bumps for clothes, and pressed lips for words, all under your favourite blanket. It has the strangest feeling of belonging somewhere while we talk about our wandering homeless souls
November. I think November is a nice month to fall in love with you again.
December
December comes with a thirst of its own. The nights spent pondering over the silken flow of time. The aghast broken hearts and the monstrous thoughts roaring over your head like guillotined hopes. It has your sunshine smiles and the heaviness of us staring back at us, through mirrors that reflects each scar and every kiss. The ticks of distance and the beeps of the oven, and the familiar smell of vanilla in the little corner of your house where we kissed, twirled, and called home.
December is intoxication on the streets, getting drunk on your lips and the smooth sways of jazz; it has laughter for riots and your breaths at 3AM. Fairy lights lit up pathways that still echo with your carols and the sweet hums of your ivory songs. It carries your essence in the letter you wrote me, your sweet scent threaded in my clothes from the afternoons when the world went oblivious in your eye, the glitters of Christmas radiating from your soul and the mistletoes we were supposed to kiss under.
December has us falling in love again, over miles, with the remembrance of how your skin felt beside mine, the calm that grew from our rooted naked legs and our heartbeats exploding through our ears with every embrace lasting for eternities we are yet to physically live.
December is you and me and drifting gazes finally anchoring on familiar shores.
