“I’m 33 years old right now and I feel like my life has just started (again), after unearthing myself from layers and layers of grief, sadness and chronic pain.
My chronic pain started when I was 19. At that time I was a professional athlete and on the pitch at any time it was allowed, juggling my studies, friends and family with my love of field hockey.
Field hockey has helped me to survive. My mom died at 13 and left my father, my two sisters and I bereft and in shock.
In total shock, to a level where we not only lost our mom, we lost our father too to depression and alcohol. It made him angry and unpredictable, it felt unsafe at home.
It had already been a tense couple of years with my mom sick and an older sister who got bullied at school and would unleash all her frustrations at home. I don’t think of my youth as a sanctuary, it was never safe and the next eruption of emotions was just around the corner.
With my mom passing, the competition between me and my sisters for the love of my father increased even more. During his ‘good hours’ we were looking for that tiny moment of appreciation, hoping to be seen, hoping to be loved. Without much effect. My sisters and I still are working through our individual trauma’s of those years.
I channelled everything into field hockey. In our community it was seen as the sport for girls, through my resilience I improved my skills and slowly made my way up to the national team.
I think I’ve never felt a passion like it. I think I’ve never felt so in flow as I did on the pitch. There was truly something there for me. My injury, a back problem going all the way down to my leg and foot, was therefore devastating. Going from doctor to doctor, first supported by the club and the team, slowly more and more on my own, resulted in little.
One of my discs was dislocated, two of them were without the fluid that helps your spine quench the power of gravity. The less fluid, the more the discs just bang on each other and create lots of friction and pain. ‘In theory, your back has the same wear as that of someone who is 70 years old’ was said to me.
And then the real circus began. For almost 15 years I saw numerous different doctors, got varieties of diagnoses, and tons of treatments, though never a solution. I met every type of doctor, the one that’s completely uninterested, the one that didn’t take me seriously, the one that was too busy, the one that only believed in medicating or the one that didn’t believe in medicines at all!
What they all had in common was that they were very convinced that they would know the solution, until, whatever they gave me, didn’t seem to work.
And then there was zero support. I’ve been rejected, and forwarded and delayed too many times to count, all the while spending more hours than the average 80 year old in the hospital in my late teens! Having to do everything by myself with little guidance or help from my father, I have never felt more alone or misunderstood when another treatment didn’t seem to make any progress.
I don’t know if anyone can relate, but I started to hate myself so much. And I felt ashamed. ‘There must be something so wrong with me for all these things not to work.’ ‘It must be my fault and I must be bothering all these important people’s time.’
In the meantime my symptoms persevered and worsened. By age 20, 21 I would spend every afternoon lying on my back for 4-5 hours straight just to not have to move, just to lessen the pain for a moment.
Aside from that my independent spirit rallied. ‘I was young, I wasn’t going to spend my life in bed??’ ‘I should be able to dance, jump, cycle and everything else!’
The truth was that I had to give up field hockey, I lost my teammates and my dream of the national team, a wound so deep I couldn’t talk about it with anyone. I tried to brush it off, make new friends and never look back.
I see now how I chaotically tried to fill up the void as much as I could by filling my agenda to the nook with other activities. Ignoring my pain, I would dance and drink until the early morning, stuff myself with painkillers and alcohol, and not think of the moment I had to ‘pay’ for these choices.
I never went overboard, and what I did was much in line with my peers, but that didn’t compensate for the fact that my body could just not do the same as the people around me. I was destroying myself and I didn’t see it.
And this was all because I never accepted my new status quo: I was not the same person I had been and couldn’t expect the same things of myself.
By ignoring that I created the worst downward spiral I could have imagined: I went from just back pain, to pain all over my left side, to the point where I couldn’t lift my left hand anymore, let alone sit for more than 30 minutes, or in general do anything without pain.
I had become pain. I had become an angry pain monster that wanted to be left alone socially, but still gave a 10 million dollar smile at work pretending everything was fine. I was ignoring both my mental and physical health and only focused on the accolades that would prove that I mattered.
That I should be cared about, that I was loveable.
Not ever getting that recognition at home, even less so when also dealing with my chronic pain, I decided to get it elsewhere; ‘society at large’.
After I finished uni I had turned into a busy VC exec building start-ups all over Asia, because that’s what was seen as ‘success’ in my environment and community. If you did that, you were ‘important’.
And so I pushed through, avoiding my grief and sadness, squashing my pain with whatever I could. It was ridiculously unsustainable, but ‘as long as no one else knew how unhappy and in pain I was, I was winning.’ If I wasn’t working 60-70 hours per week, I was probably collapsing, crying, hating my life over the pain. It was all bound to collapse at some point.
That I was able to uphold some kind of social life surprises me to this day, because I was not easy to get on with. The pain would blind me, and instead of feeling pain, I would just get extremely annoyed, impatient, spikey, rather than vulnerable or taking a break. I feel my brain had rewired ‘pain’ to ‘anger’, and thus I was going through life short-fused and quick to anger.
On top of that, there were the moments where all the projections were released of growing up in a household with a lot of shaming, blaming, verbal abuse and physical threats. People would be scarily surprised when that side of me would come out, and I hated myself beyond anything for it. I just didn’t know what else to do, and I felt so lonely and isolated.
How did I turn things around?
A burn-out made an end to this. If I had a chance to choose, I would have probably still been in the same rat race, but as I completely broke down, I had to make a change. I had to leave the job I loved. I had to pull all the breaks.
Reluctantly, because I was still not willing to accept the status quo: that I had pain. I was fighting it, convinced that ‘I shouldn’t have to deal with this’ and only asking myself ‘why am I so unlucky?’.
Nevertheless, I did end up making the change. Not just one, but a shopping list full of little changes that together decided so many aspects of my life. I moved to Bali. A change of scenery, a change of everything. And fast forward 1.5 years, everything is different.
Is my pain then caused by living ‘too fast?‘
I don’t think so, there are some core aspects of my physique not in alignment or balanced.
But I made it so much worse by not listening to what my body was saying, trying to signal all this time that I needed to rest. That I needed to build my life from a more stable base, heal my past, build energy reserves, instead of trying to push through and ignore all the time.
In Bali there was nothing on the agenda but rest. I went from crying for most parts of the day, to reading, to going to the beach, to opening myself up and meeting like minded people.
I started to devour books on pain, books on grief, books on mental health. I built boundaries, I tried every kind of therapy that was on offer. I built a sustainable rhythm, I learned to say ‘no’.
A breakthrough came when I learned about primary pain; how the brain can perpetuate and imitate pain as a way to get your attention. That you’re actually not in pain, but that actually you’re just completely overwhelmed, and because you don’t listen to your nervous system, your body creates other ways to get your attention: by creating pain signals.
I always saw myself as an independent and straightforward person, and someone who would know when they would be overwhelmed. However, only then I realised how often I would adjust myself to other people’s needs and wishes and judgements, how much trauma I carried with me, and how it was eating me up from the inside.
How toxic and sad my upbringing had been, and how much of my challenges with mental health originated from growing up in a household with a lot of conflict and unsafety, and not enough love.
I’ve been healing ever since.
I’m not saying that it’s a 1:1 relationship: heal my trauma = healing my pain. But it does go hand in hand to the extent that the more ‘space’ I have in my head, the more confident I become. The better I can draw my boundaries, the easier I can choose ‘me’.
And ‘choosing me’ has resulted in weekly different long term physical therapies that build my body up from the beginning and changing my line of work into something that fits my needs (goodbye daily toxic male dominated competition!).
What brings me purpose is that there are a lot of people out there just like me 5, 10 years ago struggling with chronic pain.
With doctors that don’t help or understand them, with hospital bill after hospital bill stacked on a pile without the end in sight. And this awful cycle of hope and disappointment with every new treatment that they try.
With the knowledge that I’ve gathered I now help and guide others, for them not to lose 15 years of their life, but find their path back much faster. To help them enjoy life, even if it comes with its adjustments. To move away from comparing to others and instead growing into the full version of who they are. On @thechronicpaincollective I share my knowledge and connect to others to help them with their struggles.
I will always have a sensitive body and a spine I cannot count on like other people. And I’m not healed yet and do have those horrible bad days where it seems there is no hope at all. But by slowly building my body up from scratch, I hope to be able to at least neutralise the damage. With the different strategies I’ve created I live a life that’s fuller than ever, that’s appreciative of every little bit. Even on the bad days.”
Anne
Bali, Indonesia