The Duration of Lessening

I. The Window

Summer unfolds with an almost unbearable sensuality.

The leaves shimmer in hues of emerald and jade, their surfaces catching the sunlight like polished glass. The breeze, warm and languid, caresses the skin with a lover's touch, carrying the scent of blooming jasmine and sun-warmed earth. Branches sway gently, performing a slow, rhythmic dance that speaks of ease and freedom.

To let summer sink into you is to surrender—to feel the sun's embrace, to taste the sweetness of ripe fruit, to hear the symphony of cicadas and distant laughter. It's an immersion into a world that pulses with life and pleasure.

But I remain apart.

This splendor, this lushness—it cuts me. I watch it all through the barrier of glass, a silent observer to a world that no longer includes me. The window becomes a symbol of my separation, a transparent wall between the vibrant life outside and the muted existence within.

I am present but not belonging.

II. Philoctetes — The Wound That Reeks

Philoctetes was not cast aside because he was weak.

Not because he lost.

Not because he failed.

He was abandoned because of the wound that reeks.

Because his body, through no fault of his own, made the air around him unbearable. Because it saturated the senses of the polis. Because it was not clean, not correct.

And I understand that—not in the abstract, not as metaphor, but as daily life.

My body is not neutral. My body does not pass unnoticed. My body interrupts, slows down the table, the street, the room.

The simple, inescapable need for assistance — for being spoon-fed if I dare go out in public — is not only humbling. It is monstrous to the rhythm of the able-bodied world.

It offends the polis. It slows its tempo, stains its symmetry.

And so people avoid me.

Not with cruelty — usually not with cruelty — but with absence. With looking away. With making themselves scarce.

As if the air itself has thickened around me.

As if my presence is a kind of wrong weather.

This is what it means to have a wound that reeks.

It is not about smell.

It is about atmosphere.

It is about existing in a body that distorts the socially acceptable outline of things.

My body does not fit the polis.

And the polis — in perfect, automatic response — does not fit me.

It rejects me.

It moves around me like water around a rock.

It endures me when it must.

But it does not want me.

And still — still — for years, for decades, I wanted to belong to it.

I wanted to belong to the careless symmetry of the world outside the window.

To be part of the golden rhythm of summer.

To walk into a room without modifying it.

To exist without friction.

To be easy.

But that is not what I am.

That is not what I have ever been.

My body itself rejects the polis.

And the polis rejects me.

And that is older than any ethics.

Older than pity.

Older than tolerance.

It is ancient.

It is mythic.

It is the curse of Philoctetes.

It is the curse of anyone whose wound is not clean, not symmetrical, not closable.

And everyone knows —

wishes are for children.

III. Heracles — The Poison Within

Heracles — undone not by combat, but by nosos, by illness.

The myth speaks volumes to those who live with chronic pain. The greatest of heroes, conqueror of monsters and impossible tasks, brought low not by an opponent he could face, but by something that ate him from within. There is no heroic battle to be won here. No monster to slay. Only the slow consumption of self.

The poisoned cloak eats into him slowly, steadily, like time itself.

This is how pain works—not as a swift executioner but as a patient predator. It doesn't announce itself with fanfare. It seeps, it burrows, it colonizes. Each morning brings the terrible recognition that it has claimed yet another small piece of you during the night. Another capability. Another joy. Another freedom.

"There is more poison in me than there is Heracles."

More poison than person.

More suffering than self.

I have thought about this line more times than I can count.

In the depths of my worst days, I feel this viscerally—that the balance has tipped, that what defines me now is not my humanity but my suffering. The pain has become the gravitational center around which everything else must orbit. My identity, my relationships, my perceptions—all warped by its inescapable pull.

I know what it is to feel that balance tip.

The transition happens so gradually you barely notice it. Then one day, you realize that the vocabulary of your existence has shifted entirely. Your days are measured not in accomplishments but in management—of symptoms, of medications, of carefully rationed energy. You become a bookkeeper of suffering.

To feel that my body — which has defended two dissertations (only one officially), which has translated from French, German, Italian, which has read and read and read — is now stupid with pain.

The cruelest paradox: the mind that was once your sanctuary becomes compromised by the very thing from which you seek escape. The intellect that defined you becomes another casualty of the poison.

Not in memory. Not in intellect.

But in what pain does to thought.

How it dulls.

How it frays.

How it makes me stupid, raw, frayed, animal — crying at the smallest thing, snapping like a rotten thread.

Pain transforms cognition into something alien. Complex thoughts dissolve into elemental emotions—frustration, anger, despair. The sophisticated apparatus of reason and analysis gives way to something more primitive. You become a creature of nerve endings and immediate responses.

Time itself becomes distorted. Minutes stretch into hours when you're in agony. The chronology of your life fractures into before and after, with the present an endless, exhausting now. There is no future planning when each day is a negotiation with your own body for basic function.

The effort of existing in pain lurches out of fatigue and falls back into fatigue.

Every action becomes a transaction. Every movement costs something. Every decision weighs the value of the effort against the certainty of the price. And always, always, the return to fatigue—that gravitational constant of the chronically ill.

IV. Niobe — Calcified, Unmoved

Niobe, who loses everything — and does not die.

This is the particular cruelty of myth and of chronic pain—the denial of release. There is no merciful end, no definitive conclusion. Only continuation. Only endurance without purpose.

She sits.

In that simple action—or rather, inaction—lies the entirety of her response to catastrophe. Not fight. Not flight. Just the terrible stamina of remaining. Of being present to what has happened and what continues to happen.

She sits until she is no longer a mother, but a cliff.

The transformation is not metaphorical but literal in the myth—grief changing flesh to stone. In chronic pain, this calcification is no less real. The body hardens around its wounds. The mind petrifies around its losses. What was once fluid and responsive becomes rigid, inflexible, resistant to both damage and healing.

Until tears outlast her body.

Until her grief is made into topography.

This is what persistent pain does—it reshapes your interior landscape. Valleys of despair. Mountains of struggle. Rivers of grief that never reach the sea. Your suffering becomes geography, becomes weather, becomes climate. It is no longer an event but an environment in which you must somehow continue to exist.

Pain hollows.

It excavates you from within, carving out chambers where vitality once resided. It leaves empty spaces that echo with what used to be there—energy, ambition, joy. You become a cathedral to your own absence.

Pain calcifies.

The protective shell forms slowly. Your flexibility—physical, emotional, psychological—diminishes by increments. Adaptations become limitations. Coping mechanisms become prisons. The calcification that was meant to prevent further injury becomes its own form of disability.

Levinas says:

"If fatigue is a condemnation to being, it is also a stiffening, a withering up, a breaking with the sources of life."

The philosopher understood what chronic pain patients know intimately—that weariness is not just a symptom but a condition. Not just a passing state but a permanent alteration of being. The fatigue that accompanies unrelenting pain is not the healthy tiredness that follows exertion; it's an existential exhaustion that precedes and pervades all action.

I feel that.

That stiffening.

That cruel paradox where the very mechanisms meant to protect you—the rigidity, the withdrawal, the diminishment of expectations—become another layer of suffering. Another loss. Another separation from what you once were.

That being hollowed out until I am like Niobe — present, but wrong.

There is a particular social agony in this—in occupying space as a version of yourself that feels fundamentally incorrect. In being seen but not recognized. In being present to others but absent to yourself.

Visible, but cut off from all the small, vital springs of life.

The small pleasures that sustain most people—spontaneity, physical ease, the simple joy of inhabiting a cooperative body—become distant memories. You watch others drink freely from wells you can no longer access.

A body out of joint with the world.

This disjointed existence is not just physical but temporal. You live at a different pace, operate within different limitations, orient around different priorities. The world continues its dance, its rhythms unchanged, while you move through it with the halting syncopation of pain.

V. Joel — The Unbearable Weight of Grief

In the final moments of The Last of Us, Joel makes a choice that resonates deeply with me. It's not just about love or protection; it's about the sheer terror of enduring that kind of loss again. The pain of grief is not a wound that heals; it's a chasm that threatens to consume. Joel's decision is a testament to the lengths one will go to avoid reopening that chasm.

I understand that. The thought of experiencing such profound loss again is paralyzing. It's a pain that reshapes you, that lingers in every shadow, every silence. And so, when Joel chooses to protect himself from that abyss, I don't judge him. I empathize.

VI. Tears in the Rain — The Erosion of Intellectual Capital

There is that scene in Blade Runner—the monologue, the final moment—where Roy Batty says he has seen things we wouldn’t believe. Flaming ships off the shoulder of Orion. Attack craft burning beyond the gates of Tannhäuser. And he says it with quiet sorrow, with reverence. These were magnificent things. And now they will be lost—“like tears in rain.”

But what I have seen… I don’t know if it was magnificent.

What I have seen is obsidian and viscous and inhuman and black and hard and rarely wondrous.

I have seen the qualities of indifference made flesh. I have seen people disappear when I needed them the most. I have seen the flicker in their eyes when they realized, too late, that I needed help cutting my food, that I needed to be spoon-fed. I have seen the shift—the recoiling—from those who thought I was easier to love when I needed nothing.

I have known what it is to lie on a public airport floor, my body stretched across the spit and cigarette butts, voices moving past me, because there was no other place for someone like me to rest.

But I have also seen the fire and blood of love.

My mother loved me with a violence so quiet it shook the earth. She kept me alive not by hoping, not by praying, but by fighting. And it took everything from her. And she did it anyway. The kind of love that costs a life to give.

And I have seen my husband hold me in moments that were not lovely. That were not easy. Those were the moments–hours and nights–of brute suffering. That required him to see all of it, and stay.

I love them both—not out of gratitude, but out of something deeper, stranger. A love forged in feral proximity to death. A love that can’t be rehearsed or theorized. It only exists because it was enacted.

And I know what it means to survive. I know the black miracle of coming back from death. I know what it means to return—to claw back the breath—and to find that the world is exactly the same as it was. That my near-death made no dent in it.

Of course I knew that. Of course I did.

Rationally, I knew.

But we aren’t meant to see that. We aren’t meant to survive our own death.

We aren’t meant to look into the sunrise and see nothing but another black miracle.

But I saw.

And I was quiet for a long time.

VIII. The Feral Within — The Unyielding Spirit

Despite the exhaustion, the frustration, and the despair, there's a part of me that refuses to surrender. It's a feral presence, raw and untamed, coursing through me like electricity. It's the part that snarls at the injustice, that rages against the invisibility, that demands to be seen and acknowledged.

This feral spirit is not polite or patient. It doesn't adhere to societal expectations or norms. It's the embodiment of survival, the instinctual drive to persist, to endure, to fight. It's what keeps me going when everything else falters.

In a world that often overlooks or dismisses chronic pain, this feral presence is my protest, my defiance, my declaration that I am still here, still fighting, still alive.

# IX. The Cry

Levinas wrote that the first cry was the cry for analgesia.

Before language, before civilization, before philosophy and ethics and law—there was pain. And the first articulation of humanity was not a declaration of existence or meaning, but a plea for its cessation. Our earliest ancestors didn't philosophize about suffering; they sought to end it.

Not meaning.

Not justice.

Not explanation.

Relief.

In these four stark negations and one affirmation lies the essential truth of pain: its immediacy transcends our intellectual frameworks. When we are in agony, we don't primarily seek to understand it or contextualize it. We want it to stop. Everything else—the meaning-making, the search for justice, the drive for explanation—comes later, after the cry has been answered.

This is the first ethics: pharmacology.

The moral imperative to alleviate suffering precedes all other ethical considerations. Before we can speak of rights or duties, of virtue or vice, of good and evil, we must address the fundamental ethical demand: to respond to the cry for relief. A society that ignores this primary obligation cannot claim to be ethical, no matter how sophisticated its moral theories.

And this is the real horror of the world we live in — the true obscene violence:

The obscenity lies not just in the existence of pain—which is, perhaps, an inescapable aspect of embodied existence—but in our collective response to it. In the structures we've built that determine whose pain matters and whose doesn't. In the systems that distribute relief not according to need but according to privilege.

That pain relief is a question of access.

Access determined by geography, by economics, by race, by gender, by the credibility of your suffering in the eyes of those with the power to alleviate it. Some pain is visible, validated, and promptly addressed. Other pain—often the pain of the marginalized—is invisible, questioned, disbelieved.

That it is politicized.

Pain becomes a battlefield for ideologies. The opioid crisis becomes a justification for denying relief to those who legitimately suffer. Fear of addiction becomes a shield behind which medical professionals hide their discomfort with others' suffering. Conservative values about endurance and liberal concerns about dependency create a pincer movement that traps the sufferer between competing moral narratives.

That it is means-tested.

The cruel calculus of healthcare economics: How much is your relief worth? What can you afford? What insurance will cover? What treatments are "cost-effective"? Behind the clinical language of healthcare management lies a brutal reality: your suffering has been assigned a dollar value, and if your resources fall below that threshold, you will continue to suffer.

That it is denied.

The myriad ways society says no to the cry for analgesia: through insurance denials, through skeptical doctors, through prohibitive costs, through stigma, through the criminalization of self-medication, through the thousand small bureaucratic obstacles placed between pain and its relief. Each denial is a betrayal of that first ethical imperative.

That the fundamental ethical failure of a society is this: people suffer endlessly because they cannot afford not to.

The moral bankruptcy of a system that permits preventable suffering based on economic status. The violence of a society that has the means to alleviate pain but chooses not to distribute that capability equitably. The failure of compassion in a world where relief is treated as a commodity rather than a right.

People live in the duration of the lessening because someone else decided they should.

The terrible power imbalance inherent in pain management: those who suffer do not control the means of their relief. That control rests with others—healthcare providers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical executives, legislators—who make decisions based on factors other than the imperative to respond to the cry.

Pain is not just personal.

It extends beyond the boundaries of the individual body. It reverberates through families, through communities, through generations. The person in pain is never just one person—they are the center of a web of relationships, all of which are affected by that pain and by society's response to it.

Pain is systemic.

It follows the fault lines of our social structures. It concentrates where power is least. It flourishes in the gaps of our care systems. It exploits the weaknesses in our safety nets. The distribution of pain in a society is never random—it is a map of our collective priorities and prejudices.

Pain is structured.

The experience of pain—its interpretation, its treatment, its social meaning—is shaped by cultural narratives, medical paradigms, economic systems, and political forces. There is no "natural" or "neutral" approach to pain; every response is constructed within and constrained by these larger structures.

Pain is policy.

Every decision about healthcare access, about medication availability, about research funding, about disability support—these are not just administrative choices but moral ones. They determine who will suffer and for how long. They are pain made into procedure, suffering transformed into statute.

Pain is a failure of ethics called something else.

We disguise our moral abdication with clinical terminology, with economic necessity, with concerns about abuse, with appeals to personal responsibility. But beneath these justifications lies a fundamental failure to honor that first cry—the plea for analgesia that is the cornerstone of all genuine ethics.

# X. When Relief Comes

And when relief does come — briefly, rarely — it feels like sheer joy.

Those moments of respite are almost surreal in their intensity. The absence of pain becomes a presence in itself—a positive sensation rather than merely the lack of a negative one. The body, so long accustomed to suffering, responds to its cessation with an almost delirious gratitude.

It feels impossible.

After months or years of constant pain, its absence takes on a dreamlike quality. You move cautiously through these moments of relief, afraid to fully inhabit them, afraid that acknowledging them might somehow break the spell. There's a superstitious quality to this caution—as if pain is a jealous god that punishes those who celebrate its departure too openly.

It feels like a thing I almost cannot believe in anymore.

The longer pain persists, the more it erodes your memory of life without it. Relief becomes increasingly foreign, increasingly impossible to imagine. You begin to distrust it when it comes—to see it as temporary, as false, as a trick your mind is playing on your body or your body on your mind.

Because there is more poison in me than me.

The scales have tipped so far toward suffering that wellness feels like the aberration. Pain has become the default state, the baseline, the foundation upon which your identity is reluctantly built. When relief comes, it doesn't feel like a return to normalcy but like an excursion into foreign territory.

Because nosos — illness — has quietly, obscenely conquered what I once was.

The conquest is insidious precisely because it's incremental. Illness doesn't announce its victories with fanfare; it accumulates them silently, one surrendered capability at a time, one abandoned pleasure after another, until one day you realize that the territory of your self has been almost entirely colonized.

It has rewritten me.

This rewriting happens at every level—cellular, neurological, psychological, social. Pain rewires neural pathways until the brain itself is fundamentally altered. It revises personal narratives until your autobiography has pain as its protagonist rather than you. It restructures relationships until they orbit around management and accommodation rather than connection.

It has hollowed me.

The excavation pain performs is thorough. It carves out spaces where joy once lived. It empties reservoirs of patience and resilience that once seemed bottomless. It creates caverns where self-confidence used to reside. And in these hollow spaces, echoes multiply—small setbacks resonate with the memory of greater losses.

It has frayed me.

The metaphor is apt—not a clean break but a gradual unraveling. Threads of capability, of endurance, of hope, coming loose one by one. The fabric of self becoming increasingly worn, increasingly threadbare, holding together but always on the verge of giving way.

It has left me stupid with gratitude for things I should never have had to lose.

This is perhaps the most perverse effect of chronic pain—the way it recalibrates expectations so dramatically that normal human experiences become treasures. A day without breakthrough pain becomes a gift. An hour of clear thinking becomes a luxury. The ability to smile without wincing becomes an achievement.

The gratitude is genuine but so is the outrage—this simultaneous capacity to be thankful for small mercies while recognizing the fundamental injustice of needing to be thankful for them at all. To be grateful for crumbs while aware you're entitled to the feast.

XI. Between Chiron and the Cry

And still.

This small conjunction contains multitudes. It signals continuation despite everything—a persistence that defies logic, defies prognosis, defies the daily evidence of deterioration. And still. Despite the pain, despite the loss, despite the transformation into something almost unrecognizable to myself.

And here.

Present. Located. Embodied. Not transcendent, not elevated by suffering, not lifted above the mundane fact of physical existence. Here, in this broken body. Here, in this moment of pain. Here, in the stubborn insistence of continued being.

III. The Cognitive Toll

Pain makes my body stupid.

Not just clumsy or limited, but fundamentally altered in its relationship to the world. The sophisticated instrument that once responded to my will with precision now betrays me constantly. The complex machinery of muscle and nerve and bone now operates with maddening unpredictability.

Pain makes my mind dull.

Cognition itself becomes a victim—thoughts move sluggishly, connections form slowly, insights once effortless now require excavation. The mind that defined me becomes less accessible, less mine.

IV. The Myth of Pain's Wisdom

There's a pervasive myth that suffering grants inadvertent wisdom—that pain bestows depth, that the afflicted have endless time to philosophize. This romanticized notion suggests suffering sharpens the mind, offering insights inaccessible to the unscathed.

The reality is starkly different. Chronic pain doesn't open doors to profound thought; it closes them. The unrelenting nature of pain consumes cognitive resources, leaving little room for anything else. Thoughts fragment, attention wanes, memory falters. It's not a gateway to enlightenment but a barrier to basic function.

In this state, I find myself starting sentences only to forget their direction. I begin tasks and pause, purpose slipping away like mist. Names of once-constant people surface unbidden, accompanied by the ache of their absence. I cling to trivial lines from television shows, not for their content, but because they require no effort to recall. They become scaffolding for my impaired cognition.

This isn't the deep, reflective thought that myths suggest. It's a survival mechanism, a way to navigate the fog that pain drapes over the mind. It's not thinking; it's half-thinking, mental flares guiding me through the haze.

No philosophy is possible from within pain.

V. The Feral Self

Yet pain has not made me docile.

This is the revelation: suffering has not softened me. It has not made me gentle or compliant. It has not produced the serene wisdom that cultural narratives about pain promise. Instead, it has awakened something primal and resistant.

There is something feral running through me.

Thin as wire.

Sharp as bone.

Unkillable.

This wildness is not poetic metaphor but lived reality—a quality of being that emerges when civilization's comforts are stripped away, when the body becomes untrustworthy territory, when existence itself becomes a daily negotiation. It is the aspect of self that refuses domestication by medical terminology or social expectation.

It moves through me like jolts of electricity — like a nerve that will not die.

The image is visceral and accurate—this feral quality is not steady or consistent but sudden, unpredictable, electrifying. It animates the body in moments of defiance. It sparks the mind to rebellion when surrender seems inevitable.

## The Weight of Exhaustion

I am exhausted.

The admission contains no self-pity, only stark acknowledgment. Fatigue becomes not just a symptom but a state of being, a lens through which all experience is filtered, a weight that transforms every action into an act of will.

Gods, I am exhausted.

The invocation of deities signals that this exhaustion transcends the personal—it reaches toward the cosmic, the mythic. It is exhaustion on a scale that demands witness from forces larger than human.

Exhausted of keeping my chin up for the sake of my loved ones.

The performance of wellness becomes its own burden. The emotional labor of protecting others from the full reality of your suffering depletes resources already dangerously low. Each reassuring smile, each minimized description of pain, each "I'm fine" is paid for in precious energy.

Exhausted of moving gently through the day like I am not breaking.

The constant self-monitoring, the careful calculation of movements, the anticipation of pain and the adjustments made to avoid it—these invisible efforts constitute a full-time occupation that no one sees and few understand.

VI. The Social Contract of Illness

Exhausted of hiding — because hiding is part of the etiquette of illness, isn't it?

Society demands a particular performance from the ill—one that acknowledges suffering enough to elicit sympathy but not so much as to cause discomfort. The social contract requires that the sick person bear the additional burden of managing others' reactions to their sickness.

Exhausted of the patience expected of the damaged.

The tyranny of inspiration—the cultural expectation that those who suffer must do so with grace, with positivity, with acceptance. The demand that pain not only be endured but be endured in a way that makes the healthy feel enlightened rather than threatened.

Exhausted of being articulate about what is killing me.

And exhausted of how much it hurts — not just the pain — but the neglect of pain.

The compound suffering: the primary pain itself and the secondary pain of having that pain dismissed, minimized, or ignored. The physical agony and the social violence of invalidation. The wound and the salt rubbed into it by indifference.

VII. The Invisible Wound

Because the others — the outsiders — they don't see the poison.

They don't see the wound.

The invisibility of chronic pain becomes its own torment. There are no dramatic bandages, no visible scars, no external signs proportionate to the internal devastation. The sufferer appears intact, functional, present—while inside they are being consumed.

There is no visible wound to provoke their horror, their mercy, their response.

This absence of spectacle has profound social consequences. Human empathy is often triggered by visual cues—the sight of blood, of injury, of suffering made manifest. Without these visible markers, compassion must be cognitive rather than intuitive, and that cognitive empathy requires effort that many are unwilling to make.

Pain — long pain — has no spectacle.

Chronic pain lacks the dramatic arc that makes suffering comprehensible to outsiders. It offers no catharsis, no resolution, no transformation into something meaningful. It simply persists, day after day, year after year, too mundane to be tragically beautiful, too enduring to be acutely sympathetic.

Unless they see the sludge of torment in my eyes—unless they truly look, not glance, not skim, but look into the marrow of me—they won’t see it. Unless they see the garrison sheen of long-stained years, the whip marks around the edges of my soul, the polish of composure that is not grace but armor. Because it is armor. The mythology I weave is armor. The poise I wear is armor. The words I calculate and wield—every sentence a blade, every syllable a shield—are armor.

But you have to know in order to see. You have to stay long enough, look long enough, care long enough.

And people—they don’t really want to know.

They turn away before the knowing sets in.

Before it stains them too.

They cannot see the sludge of torment in my eyes, not unless they are willing to look long and hard enough to let it settle into their own reflection.

They cannot see the corrosive sheen of long pain, the way it gears in and out around the edges of my soul, slowly eroding the seams of who I used to be.

Unless they see that, unless they feel the splintered language in my voice, the way composure hardens into armor—not grace but survival—

Unless they understand that the mythology I craft, the eloquence I wear, the cultural capital I perform, is all a kind of exoskeleton—

They will never see me.

VIII. Resentments

And I resent them for it.

Of course I do.

According to Jean Amery, resentment is a moral category.

I resent how they look at me and see surface. See composure. See the cultivated little edges of me — clean, fluent, unbleeding.

The rage at being reduced to appearance—at having the carefully maintained façade mistaken for the reality. At having the tremendous effort of normalcy be rewarded not with recognition of that effort but with denial of the need for it.

IX. The Feral Truth

But the real thing — the true thing — is feral.

Beneath the social performance, beneath the articulate explanations, beneath the patient endurance lies something untamed—the authentic response to unrelenting pain that society would prefer to ignore.

It is a body that no longer trusts the world.

Trust requires predictability, consistency, safety. Chronic pain destroys all three. The world becomes unreliable terrain, full of potential triggers and dangers. The simplest environments become minefields of possible exacerbation. Safety becomes a theoretical concept rather than a lived experience.

It is a mind half-wild from sleeplessness.

Pain and sleep exist in inverse relationship. As one increases, the other decreases, until insomnia becomes as much a part of chronic illness as the pain itself. And this sleep deprivation has profound effects—it fractures cognition, amplifies emotional responses, erodes rational thought, and leaves the mind in a state that is neither fully conscious nor properly rested.

It is a soul frayed down to instinct.

When suffering strips away the luxury of philosophical distance, what remains is raw, immediate, and fundamental. Not the higher functions of identity, purpose, or meaning, but the basic animal drive to continue, to protect, to survive.

X. The Will to Persist

There is something feral running through me.

It has claws.

It has heat.

It has a terrible cunning.

These attributes—sharpness, warmth, intelligence—form a constellation that defies the expected narrative of chronic pain victims as passive, cold, diminished. Instead, they suggest a different kind of power: dangerous, vital, and resourceful.

This thing inside me — this animal — it survives not because it is beautiful, not because it is good, but because it cannot be killed.

The rejection of the martyr narrative, of the pressure to be an "inspiration," of the demand that suffering serve some greater purpose or aesthetic. This feral self persists not to teach others, not to embody some kind of transcendent acceptance, but simply because annihilation is not an option.

Because there is more poison in me than me.

Because there is still me, somehow, beneath the poison.

The paradox at the heart of chronic pain: the simultaneous experience of being overwritten by suffering and yet still existing beneath or beyond it. The sense that identity has been colonized by pain and yet some essential core remains unpossessed, unconquered.

XI. Beyond Enlightenment

And that part of me?

It does not want grace.

It does not want enlightenment.

It wants to live.

The final rejection of all spiritual platitudes about suffering, all expectations that pain should be transformative, educational, or redemptive. The feral self desires neither philosophical transcendence nor religious consolation. It wants only what all living things want at their most essential: continuation. Persistence. Life, in whatever form it can manage.

XII. The Window Again

The world outside continues its dance of sensuality.

There is something obscene about its beauty now. The way sunlight filters through leaves, creating dappled patterns on the ground. The way birds arc through the air with thoughtless grace. The way flowers open themselves to the sky with abandoned vulnerability. All of it an affront to my motionless watching.

This splendor was once simply splendor. Now it is monstrous in its indifference, terrible in its continuance. The world performs its beauty without audience, without purpose, without meaning—a meaninglessness that somehow makes it more beautiful, more painful to observe.

The grass sways in the breeze, the sky radiates its azure brilliance, and summer hums its indifferent melody.

The choreography of the outside world follows rules my body has forgotten. Everything moves as it should, responds as it should, exists as it should. The grass bends without breaking. The sky holds its color without fatigue. Summer progresses without impediment.

Meanwhile, my body remembers other rules—the physics of pain, the mathematics of endurance, the chemistry of medication. The natural world and I now operate according to different principles, divergent laws that ensure we can never again synchronize.

The simplest movements out there—a leaf turning in the wind, a squirrel leaping between branches, a cloud reshaping itself against the blue—all seem like impossible magic from where I sit. Their casual fluidity might as well be a foreign language, one I once spoke fluently but can now barely comprehend.

And I am still here.

The declaration contains all the defiance of continued existence and all the defeat of unchanging circumstance. Still here—not there, not among the living choreography, not participating in the world's endless sensual conversation with itself. Still here—behind glass, behind pain, behind the invisible barrier that separates the suffering from the merely alive.

Lessened.

The perfect word for what chronic pain does—it does not annihilate but diminishes. It reduces without eliminating. It leaves enough of you intact to witness your own reduction. This partial erasure is perhaps its cruelest feature—that it takes so much but never quite everything, that it leaves you just enough self to mourn what has been lost.

Present but not belonging.

The paradox of being physically here but existentially elsewhere. Of occupying space without inhabiting it fully. Of being counted among the living while existing in a parallel terrain of experience that the healthy can never truly access. Present to others as an object of concern or pity; absent to them in the fullness of selfhood.

This not-belonging extends beyond the physical separation of window glass. It is a metaphysical exile—from the community of the able-bodied, from the fellowship of the unimpaired, from the casual assumption of capability that underlies all social interaction. To be in chronic pain is to hold a passport to a country no one wants to visit.

A scar on the landscape, forever etched between the salt and the wound.

The image captures both permanence and liminality—the scar as lasting mark and the scar as threshold, as boundary territory. To exist as a scar is to exist as a reminder of damage, as evidence of history written in flesh. But it is also to exist in the in-between—neither fully healed nor actively bleeding.

This liminal position—between salt and wound, between healing and hurting, between the world of sensuality and the realm of suffering—becomes its own kind of home. Not chosen, never comfortable, but intimately known. The perspective from the window becomes not just a view but an ontology, a way of being: observer rather than participant, witness rather than agent.

And yet, there is a dark splendor in this watching. A monstrous beauty in seeing the world from outside its dance, in recognizing its patterns without being swept up in its momentum. The window becomes not just a barrier but a lens—one that reveals what the participants in life's sensual dance are too immersed to perceive.

And so I remain, watching the obscene splendor of a world that continues without me. Neither fully separated from its beauty nor fully admitted to its dance. A creature of the threshold, of the windowsill, of the liminal space between participation and exclusion.

Present.

Not belonging.

But witnessing.

I am forever between my pain and my resentment, the snake.

I am the strange little thing 

between 

the wound and the salt.