The prickliness of pain
And the challenge of expressing it in our art.
2016 - spilling my guts, breaking my heart.
I
am
so
in
pain
confused ripped apart raw gates of shot pulsating puke of machinery synapses will you let me in will you fill my grin
will you spill my sin take me take
me hard as nails spilled
out of town.
I
am
crying
out
for
help
but you retract like a small snake like a rack tack.
I am healing hearing heat.
(From an original poem I wrote during my second hospitalisation: In pain.)
2009 - It’s everywhere and all the time.
“I hurt everywhere,” I say to my GP. I’m in her office. Again. My depression and anxiety are making me ache and puke, and my hands have started shaking at work. My pain is a palpable, everyday presence but my language is vague and insufficient. Real, but hard to pinpoint and describe. All I know is: this is not right.
This is not right.
I’m not fine. My soul feels sick. And it starts when I open my eyes and it doesn’t stop when I close them.
2015 - Writing from the wound.
I’m in my fourth year at university and doing a playwriting paper. I’m well. I’m not on meds. I don’t feel pain all over and all the time.
I’m also one year away from a formal diagnosis of bipolar, but for now, I’m not experiencing mania or depression. The medical word for this is “euthymia”, a word derived from Greek which means “well” and “soul”.
This week’s playwriting theme is: writing from the wound. I fictionalise my time in St Lucia where I was hospitalised for the first time because of a manic episode.
I’m nervous when I read my first draft of the scene to the class. The feedback I get from one of the lecturers is not exactly glowing.
In hindsight, a negative review was deserved, even though it was a little cold.
In trying to fictionalise my pain, I made it melodramatic and monstrous, so far removed from real and raw. Writing from the wound demands vulnerability and artistic distance; I wasn’t there yet.
2018 - Pain porn.
I’m well and on meds and I know my type of brain has a name: bipolar.
I read “Lost Connections” by Johann Hari.
He introduces me to the term “pain porn”. It makes me think artists should avoid laying it on thick when expressing pain and society shouldn’t demand artists to feed us a buffet of gory details.
He got me thinking: Instead of becoming desensitised to pain have we become seduced by it?
2024 - Suffering and credibility.
I’m discovering another school of thought about pain. And it goes like this:
Pain + suffering = credible + inspiring.
This school of thought can be just as dangerous as pain porn. We all suffer. But it’s tempting to think that suffering exists on a hierarchy and those who suffer the most are the most qualified to write and speak about it. In short, the lived experience is rendered more credible, readable and commercial as the misery and suffering increases.
The devasting impact of this belief is described potently in Rafael Frumkin’s article, “Autistic Literature Will Flourish When We Stop Insisting That Writers Qualify Their Autism”. Rafael writes there is a growing appetite amongst readers for:
“confirmation that to be different is to suffer, and that there is nothing more noble than having suffered a lot. This is the case for everyone, though it applies to marginalized writers especially. I’ve heard from many writers of color, queer and trans writers, women writers, and disabled writers the following exasperated refrain: It feels as if my misery is worth more to readers than my joy.”
2016 - Good material.
I’m staying a few nights at a respite care home in West Auckland with my two-month-old baby. I’m manic; experiencing racing thoughts and hypergraphia (the compulsion to write nonstop). I confess to one of the carers that I think it could be a good thing I’m experiencing this pain and this euphoria and this confusion and this creativity. It’s great material for a writer, after all. These experiences are only going to colour my art and my expression. I can talk about it with real empathy now because I’ve gone through it.
I know who I am and this thing has a name - bipolar. And I know I want to write about it.
But this is writing from an open, gaping, oozy wound. I have no insight, discernment or context. Yet.
I have no distance. Yet.
Sure my writing is visceral and sometimes vibrant, but it’s incomplete. Because beyond pain, there’s empathy and joy and optimism in my life.
I can write when I’m manic or depressed. But I wait until I’m neither to edit my work.
2024 - Writing about my pain. And writing about my joy.
I’m writing my first book. It touches on pain, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about hope and self-compassion and rest and work. But it starts with the hard times. It starts with the painful moments.
I’m trying to balance the need to be real and raw and relevant - to acknowledge that we all suffer and it’s okay to claim that - while resisting the draw to pain porn or credibility point scoring. I don’t want my readers to linger and relish and get stuck in my pain (or theirs). Neither do I want my expression of pain to be melodramatic or clickbaity.
I also know now that everybody’s experience of pain and bipolar is different. That every time I write about it, even though I research, I have to accept the fact that my expression of pain is limited, and far from universal. Ethnicity, sexuality, disability, gender identity, and socioeconomic status impact everyone’s experience of pain. How our families, friends, colleagues and communities respond to, accommodate, or stigmatise our pain can make or break our freedom of expression.
An amazing piece Katie!