Shame and bodies and an amorphous sense of betrayal

As We Know, there are a lot of respects in which I am entirely comfortable talking frankly and publicly about bodies and disease and the effects thereof.

There are also a small number of minor ailments and afflications that I'm fine discussing in the context of other people but I really don't talk about their relevance to me, because it turns out that I've managed to internalise cultural memes that say that they're things to be embarrassed and ashamed about. Not things that other people should be embarrassed and ashamed about, of course -- just me. Thinking about this last night, it occurred to me that the "problem", such as it is, might be that for the big things that are Wrong With Me my body is so far beyond what is Normal and Appropriate and so on that I just don't think those rules apply any more, and so I can ignore them and be kind to myself and to my body, which is, after all, doing the best it can. I don't think any of the big things -- the endometriosis, the connective tissue disorders, the migraines, the wonky brain chemistry -- are its fault. It is trying its best; we'll manage.

Whereas with things slightly closer to the parameters of "normal", slightly closer to "minor ways in which normal bodies go slightly wrong and get treated with faint societal disgust", I end up feeling profoundly betrayed and miserable and unable to cope, and consequently trying as hard as possible to ignore my body, which of course doesn't help anything -- so having said all this, I'm now going to actually talk about them briefly.

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In which Alex has opinions about chronic pain

On Friday afternoon I attended an introductory information session being run by the hypermobility clinic. This was useful in several respects (the factoid that the average bendy person needs to be twice as strong as the average non-bendy person to compensate for joint laxity; the articulation that part of the problem is that bendy folk tend to do everything at much greater extension than non-bendy people, meaning we make isolated joints do all the work that non-bendies use entire systems to carry out; the introduction to the set of services other than individual physiotherapy that are available via the clinic), but it also managed to hit a lot of my buttons about how discussion of chronic pain gets framed in the NHS and in the medical world more generally.

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( Resources recommended during the session )