My relationship with pain and its effect on the creative process
Published in A Bit Dodgy
1 day ago (abitdodgy.uk)
I’ve always had a rather curious relationship with pain. I’m not masochistic or anything. I’m just not sure I process pain the same way as other people. It’s doubtful that I’m either exceptional or broken, but I have a hard time gauging my pain on a scale of 1–10. Either pain affects me differently, or other people just aren’t used to dealing with it. I’m not sure.
I can assure you that I am very sensitive to being uncomfortable but simultaneously also just resigned to the reality that pain is a normal part of life. No sense in complaining about it. You just do what you can and carry on.
The human body can withstand a great deal of pain without dying, or even passing out, so I equate a level ten with things like being skinned alive or sawing off your own arm with a fork. With this in mind, I can’t seem to rationalize scoring any sort of normal pain, even what I might consider extraordinary pain, as anything higher than a four. How else could you get from back pain that you’re describing as an eight to being burned alive, which I think we can all agree on would be a ten.
I rate pain differently than pleasure. You don’t work your way up. You work your way down. Pleasure starts at zero and goes up from there. Pain, in my mind, begins at ten and works its way down. There’s also the issue of what your everyday baseline is. At my age, which is neither young nor old but somewhere in the middle, there is no such thing as a zero-pain day. My default, on a really good day, is at least a one, with the median being at least a two.
For most people, fear of pain is far worse than actual pain. It’s that blast of air the optometrist pokes you in the eye with. Can we talk about that for a minute? I think I’d rather just have the glaucoma than ever have to do that again. Maybe they could get AI to work on some sort of improvement on that medieval torture device instead of trying to write bad poetry. What the fuck are they waiting for? Tell me to look straight ahead and hit the trigger. Stop fucking with me.
What I find fascinating about pain is that it has no memory. It’s the reason why women have more than one baby. As intense as it is, when it’s gone, we can barely remember what that was like. Our brains are wired to respond to pain as a means of survival, but we don’t retain the memories of it. We remember being vaguely miserable, but that’s about it.
I realize there are people who live with chronic pain that might have something to say about all this, but I tend to think they’d agree that we learn to accommodate a level of pain over time that, if it were introduced suddenly, would be unbearable to most people.
Pain is a response to electrical and chemical signals sent to the brain that let us know that something somewhere is amiss, which means that pain is all in our minds.
In the 1962 epic film “Lawrence of Arabia,” Peter O’Toole likes to perform a trick where he lets a match burn down to his fingertips. A junior associate tries to replicate the feat and yelps as the fire burns his fingers.
“Ahhh,” he exclaims. “It bloody well hurts.”
“Of course, it hurts,” says Lawrence.
“What’s the trick, then?”
“The trick, my dear man, is not minding that it hurts.”
Therein lies the rub. Pain is a mental process designed to take precedence over other cognitive functions. It’s the car alarm that you can try to ignore, but that will eventually drive you mad. Occasionally, it will go quiet, and the relief is so profound, but just when you think you can relax, it starts back up, and it’s even more maddening than before. If and when it does stop, it doesn’t take long to take the silence for granted. You can’t even begin to remember how you functioned with a car alarm blaring constantly.
The good news is that we are capable of distracting ourselves with other things and can, at times, at least temporarily, force the pain into the background. I’m not saying it’s easy. Anyone who has to perform higher mental functions, especially creative ones that require more intense focus, such as writing, designing, or directing, while also dealing with pain is working much harder than you might imagine. They might only be operating at 60–70% of capacity because a significant portion of their brain is focused on pain. Like someone who is missing an arm or a leg, they’ve been able to find workarounds to do more with less.
It’s been almost two weeks since a recent surgery I had, and I’m still dealing with the aftermath. I’m past the point of tedious minute-to-minute survival. Rather than the pain occupying 60–70% of my brain, I’m getting down to 30%. Soon, I’m confident it will be at 20, then 10, and if all works out as planned, eventually to zero. Short-term pain for long-term gain.
I won’t be pain-free, of course. I still have chronic back and neck issues, but they’re manageable, and frankly, I could be doing more about it. But if I could remove that obstacle from my life permanently, it would be a whole new world for me. Who knows what I might accomplish?
I have long theorized that all creative endeavor requires significant impediments, or they fall flat, becoming weak and derivative. Creativity and innovation are like building muscle. You can’t do it without the pain of breaking down the flesh somewhat. If you ever found yourself pain and obstacle-free, there would be no need for creative expression.
You would just be.
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Written by David Todd McCarty
·Editor for A Bit Dodgy
A cranky romantic searching for hope and humor. I tell stories. Most of them are true. I’m not at all interested in your outrage, but I do feel your pain.