I want to write about pain. I am in pain a
lot more these days than I use to be, although instead of this being unpleasant
and a ticket to the imaginary violin show it is actually a
great way of knowing what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I now know that if
my back hurts, I should change something, and no amount of persisting through
this pain will remove an injury or be rewarding. Pain does not have to be alarming
or a prelude to disaster - it is the only phone your body has to your train of
thought and decision-making processes. It’s a flaw of the English language that
so many types of unpleasantness all fall under the umbrella term "pain". Some learn
the hard way how to discriminate productive and harmful pain. Some will suffer
the long-term and debilitating pain of emotional trauma or mental illness. I’ve
felt sad and hopeless and tormented at times, as much as anyone departing
adolescence, but for now my first-hand experience resides in pain from
injuries, exercise and hard work.
Discomfort and awkwardness is inevitable in
the pursuit of your Goals and Dreams. Feeling like shit on a run, or wanting to
neck yourself finishing off assignments at 4am isn’t really pain, as you once
decided (even if deluded) that the benefits of the end result would outweigh
any transient relief you’d get by quitting. Some of this pain isn’t the physical
fatigue from exercise, but the knee-jerk negative self-talk that typically
surfaces either 5 mins before work or 10 min into it. The amount of times I
have taught swimming to boys and girls of all ages and heard them say, “I can’t
do it!” is shocking. Why would you add even more stress to an already demanding
activity? You can’t change the feeling of lactic acid or unfamiliarity to a new
activity, but you most certainly don’t have to say, “I can’t do it”, just
because you aren’t beach whaling on the couch, or having mum and dad do it for
you. The most confident children I have ever
taught are those deemed as ‘badly behaved’, or whose first language isn’t
English. The beginner prep class, which has many students from both of these
groups often have no concern over the very real possibility of them drowning.
This provides to be a thrilling experience for me, as 12 screaming five
year-olds dump their heads in the water for just enough time to come up, cough,
scream, then do it again. They will rarely listen to instructions on how to
hold a kickboard so as not to plunge and die. The sheer excitement of learning
something new, or having no concern for boundaries would do wonders to remove
the hell everyone outside the beginner prep swimming class have in persisting
through hard work.
In saying this, it’s fair to say that some
exercise and work is far harder than working up a sweat. During a race, or a hard
ergo session, the fine feeling like you are breathing through a straw and your
legs hold mini washing machines of acid is quite heinous. This, however, is not pain, it
is physical and mental fatigue whose benefits outweigh the cost of feeling
like shit for less than an hour unless
you are very odd and do threshold exercise for more than an hour. I now
know that rowing isn’t meant to be painful for your back, which I still find
very confusing, and I put this down once again to confusion on word choice to
describe unpleasant feelings. Rowing can be a slog in a myriad of ways, but
none of these ways should involve pain. My current impression of pain, relating
to my minor injury (googling pictures of broken backs and herniated discs is a
humbling exercise) is the rather singular sensation that someone has turned me
into a live “Operation!” game, whereby this very evil individual places those
little tweezers ever so delicately on a certain spot slightly off centre in the
lower back, but threw the game out to sea, so that when waves come and go the
buzzing comes ON and off and ON and off. If only my body could have
communicated to me in words. It could have said, “you need to stop rowing now,
my name is L4-5 disc, I am already quite frail from being smashed by an oar six
months ago and I won’t be happy if you row again today. I want a rest and you
need to give me a rest. Or else.” I now know that this pain is not okay, but washing machine and straws are fine, and that will pipe down when I fully
emerge from my indolent life to row again.
This epiphany of pain vs. necessary stress
will extend only as far as me and anyone else who decides not to row or lift or
hunch over when their body sends pain signals. Unfortunately, there exists a
pandemic of heady discourse surrounding pain, and the shame that exists in
taking it seriously. “Pain is temporary, glory is forever”. “Pain is weakness
leaving the body”. These teach a dangerous attitude to pain and stress for two
reasons, the first being that it encourages irresponsible, self-loathing toward
exercise, the second being that you must go through something you hate or wish
to stop to get what you want. When your body is at 100%, why should any
training or hard work be that unpleasant? Yes, we can go back to the washing
machine and straws, but surely exercise-endorphins, doing an activity with
friends, the feeling of accomplishment and contributing to your long-term
health and fitness outweigh stresses that you know won’t actually hurt you the
way real pain does.
This is where my issue with the term,
“first-world problem” comes in. Laden with the stench of middle-class guilt, it
assumes that these potentially painful problems aren’t worth fixing, because
their tendency to occur around monetary wealth reduces their value. Placing
your problems concerning broken iPhone screens and ugly cufflinks next to those
of the North Korean single teen mother doesn’t make them any less. What’s more,
if you really think you need perspective, misfortune doesn’t discriminate
between culture and money. Why not stick to what you know, and compare your problems
to your friends instead of faceless strangers? I met a walker on crutches at
the Colour Run on Sunday, who shattered his L1 vertebrae. He had been in a
wheelchair for 10 weeks, and hoped to return to rock climbing in 6 months. After fracturing two vertebrae, I was back to training at full capacity in 6 weeks. Instead of complicating my
problems further with the secondary guilt of someone's problems in another country, I can immediately look to the person next to me and
snap out of any self-pity just fine. Both of my parents have been through back
surgery for herniated discs. When I taught a kindergarten and primary school in a distant Peruvian town, the young people there were a lot less messed up than here, and they would have
cared if I were upset about something.
Pain is a legitimate and important lifeline
from your body to brain, or feedback on situations whose unpleasantness
transcends long-term benefit. Take it seriously, and learn to discriminate
between fatigue, injury and negative self-talk. Our problems and mountains are
often relative, and it sometimes helps to see the other side, but actually see
it in friends and family instead of assuming that it only exists when you
aren’t living with money in Australia. I can’t row, but I can do many other
things. This week I’ve got an unlimited pass to a yoga studio (Barre Body! Get on it!) and I’m aiming
for 15 classes. Having limitations can make you bored and pissed off, but also
creative. Stop bitching and work with what you can. As Christina Aguilera once
said, “After all that you put me
through, you think I'd despise you, but in the end I wanna thank you, 'cause you've made me
that much stronger”. Booyah. Now stop reading, get your runners on and go for a run. Or walk if you have shin splints.
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