Finding Connection: On Writing about Chronic Pain

Finding Connection: On Writing about Chronic Pain

By Francesca Grossman

As I have been thinking about pain and its consequences on my life, I have talked with other people (mostly women) about the pain in theirs. I find, from casual conversations as well as more in-depth research, that many more women are in pain than I ever considered. This is humbling and freeing. Though I should have assumed if I had chronic pain so did a good portion of the population, it has always been easy to feel alone. 

I hurt. I hurt in the morning when I turn over to get up; I hurt when I carry groceries; I hurt when I turn my head to the right to back out my car out in reverse. My stomach burns, my joints swell, and my liver rejects everything I eat and drink. I live a life of chronic pain, and it has made life difficult and lonely.

As I spoke to women, it became clear to me I was not the only woman who felt isolated and singular in my daily life in pain. Almost everyone felt the same. What makes us keep quiet? It couldn’t only be the pain that kept us so secluded. There had to be other reasons we felt so disconnected. This book is a quest to find out what those reasons are. 

While the pain may always be with us, maybe this feeling of isolation doesn’t need to be. Maybe if I can offer a glimpse into my life and the lives of other women who live in pain, it can make us all feel a little less alone. It seems like that’s the real work to be done.  

I don’t talk about pain very often. I tell myself it is because people don’t want to hear me complain, but it is more than that. I’m ashamed of my pain. I’m ashamed of my weakness. 

What is it about pain that is so shameful? 

We write personal narrative so that readers can connect with us. We write memoir so that when someone reads our story, it makes them say “hold on, that happened to me too; I have felt that way too.” Not to say that everyone has had all the same experiences. Of course not. But we have all experienced love, and loss and grief and hope – and frankly, that’s all personal narrative is about, at it’s essence. Every story is just a way into understanding the human condition. 

Writing about pain is a vehicle for connection. When I started thinking about my own chronic pain, and how isolated I have always felt because of it, it became clear to me that if I wrote about it, it would no longer only live inside my body. It would exist also in the space between writer and reader. And that seemed important. 

Writing about pain gets it out; but it does more than that. Writing about it invites other people to look at my story, and the stories of others whom I interviewed, and say “Hold on, me too.”

Writers need to know that what they do matters. Even if only one reader can connect with our story it is worth writing. That simple truth grants us the permission that so many writers crave. We can and we should write about our pain, because there are readers out there who care. 

The culture of chronic pain is one that is shrouded in shame, silencing and fear. Many people do not talk about their pain because they have been told that they are complaining or they are afraid of losing their foothold in a world that is not set up for them. Many people in pain feel like their lot in life is to be stuck to bear it alone. 

But when we write about pain, we hold it up in the light. In writing about it, we solidify it’s value in the greater human conversation. And if we do it right, we can connect people through this shared experience. We take them from a place of loneliness to a place of community. We tell them that what they are experiencing has merit, and that we too, know how they feel. 

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Francesca Louise Grossman is a writer and writing instructor. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Brain, Child Magazine, The Manifest Station, Ed Week, Drunken Boat, and Word Riot, among others. She runs writing retreats and workshops internationally and leads an annual intensive workshop at The Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has a BA and MA from Stanford University and a doctorate from Harvard University in education. Her acclaimed book “Writing Workshop: How to Create a Culture of Useful Feedback” is used in universities and workshops all over the world. Francesca lives in Newton, MA, with her husband and two children. Find out more about her at https://francescagrossmanbooks.com/.

Not Weakness: Navigating the Culture of Chronic Pain

After thyroid cancer, Crohn’s disease, and a slew of other autoimmune conditions ransacked her body in her twenties and thirties, Francesca was left feeling completely alone in her chronic pain. Constant, relentless, often indescribable, and always exhausting, it affected her whole life―intimacy, motherhood, friendship, work, and mental health. Yet it was also fairly invisible―and because of that, Francesca felt entirely alone in the centrifuge of her own pain. But after twenty-plus years of living this way, isolated and depressed, she started to wonder: if she lived in pain, others must too―so why couldn’t she name one person in her community who suffered like she did?

On a whim, Francesca started asking women in her community if they had chronic pain―only to find that she was surrounded by women also battling in silence. The more she spoke to people, the more she found common themes and experiences, proving that her stories of pain were not unique, and neither were her feelings of loneliness and seclusion. Liberated by this discovery, Francesca realized something: while she couldn’t alleviate anyone’s pain, maybe she could lift the shadows surrounding it―bring these common stories into the light, with the goal of helping her fellow chronic pain sufferers feel a little less alone.

Imbued with a deep respect for the women who tell their stories in its pages, as well as a healthy skepticism of the healthcare world and how it can silence, shame, and ignore women in pain, Not Weakness is galvanizing memoir about living and loving with chronic pain.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing