Musing on Multitudes & Multiplicity

Hello from Pain Activism HQ!Soon I will have exciting updates about the Unshame Pain Video Project and forward momentum on my Pain Activism & Education vision. For the moment, I am posting some of my musings about the multiplicity of experiencing bodies with illness and pain.Also, I want to share this wonderful The World We Want To Live In interview project created by my friend Freddie, asking the question, "What is your role & work in this political moment?" Check it out here: https://worldwewanttolivein.com/Now, on to my Musing on Multitudes and Multiplicity! As always, thanks for reading and sharing your heart.Ma'ayanWhen I talk about my body, I notice there is an ever-present delineation of before and after. “Before I got sick...,” “I got sick young…,” “when I got sick…” Aside from the inherent contradiction in suggesting that one “gets” sick (the concept of “getting” is peculiar to begin with and even more so in the case of illness or pain: What is it, exactly, that I have gotten?), it’s interesting to me that I’ve adopted this way of relating to and narrating my experience of the onset of illness and pain.Illness and pain, pain in particular I would argue, are deeply internal and interior experiences yet they are so often related to and measured as exterior events. I find this telling because I believe that this disconnect within ourselves is indicative of the broader lack of societal and cultural context or modeling of how we relate to the internal experience of being a body, especially a body in pain.My brother, Zachary, who is 25 and has Down syndrome, refers to his experience as “bodies,” plural: as in, “I’m sad about my bodies.” Zac developed this orientation of his “bodies,” or at least made it known, after becoming a partial paraplegic at age 16 due to a totally unexpected spinal cord bleed. What happened is a whole story in itself, but what is striking to me is how the plural speaks to the multiplicity of being and experiencing a body...or bodies!We don’t only perceive one experience at any given time: my torso can be overheated and my feet can be cold, I can be sad about the news and happy to be with a friend, I can feel deep love and great fury all for the same person. Or, here’s one most people can relate to: being cold, hungry and needing to pee. Which to attend to first? Ahhh!But where pain and/or illness are concerned, what is reflected to us is a singularity of experience. We, or I, at least, perpetuate the narrow understanding of our experiences in thinking about ourselves this way. This reduction of experience, and the value or judgments that are attached to particular experiences, like being “sick” and being “healthy,” contribute to the marginalization of people in pain. When I say, “Before I got sick…” I am suggesting that experiencing “getting sick,” and therefore the experience of not having been sick, are singular. In truth, before I “got sick” I had many experiences of my bodies, and now I still have many experiences of my bodies.I am reminded of the line, “I am large, I contain multitudes” in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In reclaiming pain, it is powerful to reclaim our expansiveness not only in what it means to live with pain but also to recognize the “multitudes” of our lived experiences internally/interior and externally.I likely will continue finding myself separating my existence prior to perceiving myself to be ill and experiencing chronic pain, but I believe it is important to notice and shift my orientation of myself this way to honor all that I am and all that I experience. I invite you to join me by reflecting on the multitudes of yourself!