Coping with Chronic Illness and Pain

For when it's *not* going away

On “Dear Lithium Story Time,” a micro edition of this advice column I run off of my Instagram story, a young woman asks:

Dear Lithium, I was diagnosed with osteoporosis at 21 and I’m feeling really bad. Any advice on how to manage this?

She then wrote into the long form “Dear Lithium” asking to hear more about my perspective and how I cope.

Dear Diagnosed,

There’s so much I want to say to you, and there’s so much I wish I understood when I was first sick. The sad reality for me, though, is that I don’t think I can actually communicate the bulk of it. Illness is something that happens to us and, in the end, we are pretty fucking powerless against it. Eat right, take yer meds, do your little stretches, etc. But the body, the body, the body will never be tamed.

So what are the lessons?

In the firestorm that is chronic illness, chronic pain: learn to be okay. It’s easy to dwell and to be sad and pissed and to yell and cry. And I think those are good things to do. But 10 years after the fact and you don’t want to still be living a life like that.

Learn that it’s okay that, actually, you’re not okay. I don’t know much about early onset osteoporosis so I can only speak to my own illness, but let me say, anyone that would be “okay” with degenerative illnesses and chronic pain taking over their body is a psychopath (clinical). I’m not okay with what’s happening to me and I would stop it if I could, but I can’t. So in the aftermath of that, I’m okay with my powerlessness.

It’s like this meta-okayness. At the baseline, of course I’m not fucking okay. But zoom out a little bit and, yeah, I’m okay that I’m not okay. This is the Buddha’s teaching of the second arrow.

I hope for you that you can find ways of engaging in your life that are wholly fulfilling and that don’t feel like compromises. I hope that if you must make those compromises you still make the best of it. I can envision a life for myself when I’m alive but where chronic pain has essentially killed me, and I’m a shell. Don’t ever submit to that path.

My health rules every hour of my life, it rules even the most basic and mundane of decisions that I make. Within this, I have found a way to transition, to have gender affirming surgeries, to pursue my art, to write, and to build a community of friends who I love endlessly. If I were well my life would look radically different, and I’m learning to be okay with this. I’m learning to build my life based on what’s in front of me, not what I desire to be in front of me.

I wish you so much luck my friend,
Lithium

P.S. have u tried yoga?