Conversation Two

Why Do You Think Your Body Feels the Way It Does?

A short Conversation about the explanation you already carry — and why it matters.

I’d like to ask you something, and then I’d like to explain why I asked.

Most people who have lived with pain for a long time already have an explanation. Not one they went looking for — one that arrived over the years, out of appointments and articles and things people said in passing, and eventually settled in.

You may have heard yours so often that it no longer sounds like an opinion. It sounds like a fact about you.

Before we go any further, I’d like to know what yours is. Not the version you give at appointments. The one you actually think when it’s late and you’re moving carefully around your own house.

If you were asked right now why your body feels the way it does, what would your answer be?

Some people answer immediately. Age. Stress. An old injury that never quite healed. Fibromyalgia. Inflammation. Weight. The job. Genetics — my mother had this too.

Some answer with a feeling rather than a reason. My body is worn out. My body is angry with me. My body gave up on me somewhere along the way.

And some people answer honestly: I have no idea anymore.

Every one of those is a real answer, and every one of them is welcome.

I don’t want it cleaned up. I don’t want the polite version, or the hopeful version, or the one that sounds like you’ve made peace with something you haven’t made peace with. I’m not going to correct it, argue with it, or tell you what it says about you. Not today, and not later.

A meadow of tall grasses in soft morning mist

Here is why I ask.

The explanation a person carries quietly shapes almost everything else — what she expects from a morning, what she thinks is worth trying, what she assumes is permanent and what she believes might still move. Two people can have very similar bodies and very different lives, largely because of the sentence each of them believes about herself.

You’ll notice I didn’t ask about your relationship with your body. People ask that, and for someone who has been in pain a long time it can land strangely. When a body has been difficult for years, you don’t relate to it — you manage it. You work out what it will allow today and you plan around that. Detaching a little is not a flaw. It’s how people keep going.

So I’m asking the practical question instead, because it’s the one you’ve most likely already answered a hundred times in your head.

And I want your answer now, at the beginning, before we talk about anything else — because answers given later are always a little influenced by what someone has just told you. Yours, as it stands today, is the only version of it that will ever exist.

Would you write it down somewhere simple?

The back of an envelope, a note on your phone, the inside cover of whatever book is nearest. A sentence or two is plenty. There is nothing to submit and nowhere to send it — it stays with you.

Much further along, I may ask you to find it again and read it back. Not to see whether you were right. Only so you can notice, in your own handwriting, whether anything has quietly shifted. That kind of change is very hard to see while it’s happening, and surprisingly clear afterwards.

If nothing has changed by then, that will be worth knowing too.

That’s all for today. One question, honestly answered, kept somewhere you can find it.

— Tammie

Another Conversation is being written slowly, and it will be waiting here when it’s ready. Nothing is expected of you between now and then.

The conversation continues whenever you’re ready.

Whenever you’d like company again, the Conversations will be right where you left them.