Useless.

That is the word that recurrently floats in my mind on days when a flare-up of my chronic pain prevents me from being able to accomplish anything, including small simple chores.

It’s discouraging to be a young, fit and otherwise healthy adult, and have to face the fact that today, the chronic pain is interfering so much, that walking towards the drier to grab the pile of clothes, to then fold them is too much. Even if the folding part would be done while laying down on the bed. It’s not that unfolded clothes is the end of the world in and out of itself – I mean, how many mothers can confidently say that they sometimes don’t even get around to fold the pile of clothes before its content is used up. The distinction here is that these mothers weren’t incapable of doing so in theory, but that in practice, the large number of tasks they were taking on left them no time to get to the clothes pile. And so, the frustrating part, the one that makes me feel ‘less than’, is thus that in theory, I was incapable of getting it done.

I didn’t have a choice in the matter – my body made the choice for me, and forced me to be a prisoner of its will. It’s not as if I could drop another task to have enough time or enough energy to do this one, no, I didn’t have such negotiation powers with my body. My only choice was to comply.

If you’re naturally a laid-back person, you’re likely puzzled. “Why not enjoy laying down guilt-free? After all, if anyone criticizes you for not accomplishing anything, or for being a messy person, you can point to the fact that although you would have loved to slave for hours, you simply couldn’t. And thus you’d enjoy binge watching your favorite show without a drop of guilt on your conscience.”

Two elements are overlooked when presenting such a valid question:

1) “I couldn’t” – *cringe* – is not an easy thing for people like me to chew out. This layered issue will be unfolded in subsequent posts.

2) Procrastination never tasted as sweet as when the outstanding matter was of great importance. A Summer day spent mulling because everything was closed and the electricity shut down everywhere is never as satisfying as the day spent procrastinating although you have a huge report to finish writing for the next week. It’s the concept of choice. You’d have the choice, if you wanted to, to slave around for hours, but you chose to instead binge watch your show during these hours.  You weren’t confined against your will to lay there; you chose to lay there albeit responsibility to get something else done was looming over your head. If anything, there is some thrill with procrastination. The entrapment feeling isn’t triggered for you, but oh is it ever so present for me.

If you’re familiar with healthy coping skills related to chronic pain, you know that the healthy next step is to embrace what your limitations are, so as to move past the entrapment feeling. You cannot control what your body’s immediate capacity is, but what you can control, is how much you’ll suffer mentally during this incapacity (more on that in future posts).

And so, I leave you with this comic from TheSquareComics, to help you put things into perspective, on the days where your incapacity makes you feel useless:

Want something a little pop rock to bang out the frustration of uselessness? Check out Relient K’s “More than Useless”: