Enduring Pounds of Pain

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
- Zora Neale Hurston

I had a lumpectomy on January 10, 2024. What a way to start the new year…

My mentioning it now is a piece of something significantly more important. While I could have posted about it on my social media, I wasn’t sharing to garner sympathy and empathy. Social media is a great dopamine enhancer but seconds to minutes later, I would be as fleeting a thought as a cat meme. I want to be cared about more than just the amount of time it takes someone to get through a Story.

My surgery was a stark reminder of Zora Neale Hurston’s word but it also infuriated me at the same time. Being asked if someone cutting into my breast to remove problematic tissue will hurt, is a bit maddening. Mainly because a lumpectomy can be googled and it’s evident that an obvious amount of pain will accompany this procedure. Sure, I was put to sleep, given a pain blocker, and pain medication but STILL painful and requires slowing down. It requires more pauses than I can honestly afford because the world just won’t stop turning.

Zora Neale Hurston’s words have sat in my soul since I was a child. Even before I knew they were hers. While she could have been referring to a myriad of things having nothing to do with me (she died two decades before I was born), her words are still relevant. You can tell people that you are in pain, something/someone is causing you pain, and that you would like the pain to stop, but there is never a guarantee that your cries will fall on listening ears or available shoulders. I remember being told to go to God in prayer and whatever was ailing me would be lifted because God would never weigh anyone down with anything they couldn’t carry. I began to question if this grand entity was even listening because the weight kept getting heavier with each day. My prayers weren’t elaborate or unreasonable. They were so simple that I had almost convinced myself that maybe I was doing it wrong. Maybe I needed to construct some complex request. I also reasoned that an all-knowing entity who sees all things doesn’t need a detailed breakdown. So I continued to keep it simple. It felt as though I was begging for something no person should have to beg for though. Imagine a child praying several times, day and night, for safety and being denied that simple request by an entity described as the epitome of love by so many of its loyal followers.

Please help me eventually became, Please help me and my sister. This eventually led to, Please help me, my sister, and my brother. There were different variations of the simple prayer. I can recall many days and nights of doing nothing but repeating in a chanting like way, not aloud but in my head, Please make him stop hurting us. Please save us. There were a few times that I mentioned this pain to others who I figured might be a source of help but I was eventually silenced. Later on in life I would be asked ad nauseum, Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you keep saying something until someone listened?, as if the reason the pain continued was due to my lack of inaction.

It set a precedent. No matter how much I know Zora Neale Hurston’s words to be true, I also learned that when you are not silent, they’ll STILL kill you and say you enjoyed it. They’ll still say you didn’t speak up enough or that you weren’t loud enough when you did speak. It’s unfortunately part of the darker side of humanity, to cast blame towards the suffering for even suffering in the first damn place. If you were to ask anyone if they would willingly sit by and watch a child being harmed in any way, shape, or form, most if not all would immediately and emphatically say, “No!” However, it happens everyday as we lean into the belief that how other people raise their children is none of our business. It happens everyday as we assume the child deserves whatever the parent deems necessary because they’re children who don’t know no better. It happens so much that it’s common for people to act as if they had no idea children were being mistreated when it comes out years later even though there were glaring signs.

So, in my case, you start to get used to the pain. You tell yourself that it’s been happening for so long that when it shows up throughout life, it becomes customary to speak less about the pain and suffer in silence. Because when exactly will you be heard?

Sometimes the pain, mentally, emotionally, AND physically becomes that unbearable weight again and it compels you to start speaking up. The faces of the non-believers might change but there’s never a shortage of people waiting to make you think it’s all in your head. You have the holistic gaslighters who tell you that your pain isn’t real; it’s a result of what you are spiritually absorbing and your gut health. You fix those things and your pain will go away. You have the mind over matter aka law of attraction gaslighters who will tell you as long as you focus on the pain, yes, you will have the pain. You have the religious gaslighters that tell you that your relationship with God needs improvement and that’s why it feels like you are experiencing an unbearable weight. Always remember 1 Corinthians 10:13, God will not give you more than you can handle and he’ll always provide a way out. Then there’s the common garden variety gaslighter that tells you maybe it wasn’t as bad as you think it is or maybe you’re misremembering because the brain has a way of retelling us things incorrectly.

Despite all of the gaslighting, the physical affects never subside. I have just learned how to live with them.

My pain is also directly connected to my anxiety so the layers of anguish go pretty deep.

As much as I continuously fought for this surgery, due to the amount of physical pain I’ve been in for years, there was also an accompanying dread. Will I have enough recovery time? Will someone be available to help my daughter should she need something I cannot provide for her while I’m recovering? Will I have the help I need? What if I schedule this surgery and the day of, I have no ride? What if I run out of painkillers and there’s no one around to get me more? What if I get laid off of work right after I have the surgery? What if I get an infection and I have to go back to the hospital? What if the hospital accounting made a mistake and I have to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket? There’s more What If’s and they aren’t being pulled out of thin air. Over the years, these very real questions have been lived realities so ANY time my pain causes me to be in situations where I must rely on someone else, the spiral usually starts too.

It’s a different kind of pain than the lumpectomy but it’s still an existing pain in the ass, for me.

So, who do I tell? A therapist? Sure. She’ll be privy to all of this but a therapist would be one of the last people who would kill you and say you enjoyed it. Do I tell the people who say “I love you” even if they’re the same people who cannot identify? Do I tell the people who assume they’re a safe space but when you get to the hard parts of life, that safety disappears? Do I tell the people I call “friend” just to be met with silence because they’re uncomfortable seeing, hearing, and knowing I’m actually a real person who bleeds? Who. Do. I. Tell.

At some point, you begin to understand why a lot of pain is experienced alone. Zora was definitely telling the truth but we often forget that more than one thing can be true at the same time. I’m not in a place where I’m simply taking what I can get. The breadcrumbs of care don’t suit anyone, no matter how much we can convince ourselves that a crumb is better than nothing. Crumbs of love, affection, and care are actually more insulting than none at all… to me. They are indications that more COULD be given but this is all you’re going to get AND you should be grateful because IT COULD be nothing. Whereas nothing is very clear. Nothing offers no hope that maybe there’s more later on if you keep smiling and show gratitude for the smidgen tossed your way.

Crumbs of care will never be enough for a lifetime of pain.

So, I’ll speak on my pain where I know it won’t fall on deaf ears. It won’t be often and sometimes it won’t be in detail but it’s always there until it isn’t. I don’t need to prove that to anyone to know I deserve to be cared about and listened to. Me being silent about my pain to other people is nothing more than knowing they aren’t the people to share my pain with… I’m not here for the entertainment of others. I’m not here to be someone else’s example of how bad it can be. I’m not the sprinkling of trauma porn in someone’s doom scroll.

I’m a real ass person with real ass pain that I DO NOT enjoy. I don’t think it’s asking too much for people to tap into their humanity and believe it when I say it the first time.