Sonya Huber: What Pain Wants
WHAT PAIN WANTS
Pain wants you to put in earplugs because sounds are grating.
Pain has something urgent to tell you but forgets over and over again what it was.
Pain tells you to put your laptop in the refrigerator.
Pain runs into walls at 45-degree angles and ricochets back into the center of the room.
Pain resents being personified or anthropomorphized.
Pain is a four-dimensional person with fractal intelligence.
Pain want to be taken to an arts and crafts store.
Pain likes to start big projects and not finish them.
Pain wants to clean one countertop.
Pain asks you to break itself up into neat square segments like a chocolate bar.
Pain makes a hissing popping hum like high tension powerlines.
Pain has ambition but is utterly unfocused.
Pain will get its revenge if you ignore it but sometimes forgets what it was angry about.
Pain wants to watch a different channel than you do on t.v.
Pain looks at you with the inscrutable eyes and thin beak of an egret.
Pain stubs out the cigarette of your to-do list.
Pain will first try to do some things on that list but will end up with socks on its antlers.
Pain demands that you make eye contact with it and then sit utterly still.
Pain folds the minutes into fascinating origami constructions with its long fingers.
Pain leaves the meter running.
Pain asks you to think about the breath flowing in and out of your lungs.
Pain will ask you to do this three hundred and seven times today.
Pain does not mean any harm to you.
Pain is frustrated that it is trapped in a body that is ill-fitting for its unfolded shape.
Pain has been born in the wrong universe.
Pain is wild with grief at the discomfort it causes.
Pain wants to collect bottle caps to show you the serrated edges, which mean something it cannot explain.
Pain keeps pointing to serrated edges and scalloped patterns but cannot explain how these will unlock it.
Pain emphasizes that it is not a god, but then makes the symbol for “neighbor” over and over, and you do not understand what it means.
Pain puts its beaked head in its long-fingered wing hands in frustration and loneliness.
Pain winks at you with its dot-black eyes and tries to make the sign for “I love you."
Pain folds up its wings and legs and spindles quietly and blinks up at you when you say, “I know."
Pain understands that you cannot say “I love you” back but that there is something bigger behind “I love you” that you do not have the words for.
Pain also understands that the background to “I love you” is something like a highway.
Pain licks at its hot spots like an anxious dog.
Pain, when held in place, spirals down into drill bits, so it has to keep moving to prevent these punctures.
Pain asks you to breathe deeply so it can zing about and not get caught on the edges and corners of calendars, books, and electronic rectangles.
Pain’s favorite music is the steel drum, and its favorite flavor is fig.
Pain prefers any texture in which tiny seeds are embedded.
Pain shakes its head—no, it says, that is you that likes that texture—and will have nothing to do with spheres.
Pain wants only for you to see where it starts and you stop, but you are a transparent bubble.
Pain and its kind have waited patiently for humans to evolve into the fourth dimension but they are worried the project is failing.
Pain feels as though Earth’s gravity is as strong as Jupiter.
Pain has something metallic in its bones and is captured by the magnetic core of our hot planet.
Pain envies flesh and its soft strength and ease of movement.
Pain inhabits curved soft bodies in hopes of fluid movement and then cries when it breaks them.
Pain would like french fries and Netflix.
Discussion Questions
Everyone's experience of pain is different. Which things in Sonya Huber's list in “What Pain Wants” are most powerful to you? Which are most familiar? Which surprised you? What have you or your patients experienced that is not on this list?
Let's chat about what kinds of things pain wants from an individual. There are almost 50 things in this list of what pain wants. What does this long list say about the role of chronic pain in a person's life?
What can this essay and Judy Chicago’s painting teach us about supporting and caring for individuals in pain? How can a person's individual experiences of pain in day-to-day life be taken into account in their care?
Reflections from #MedHumChat
“Pain making the sign for neighbor and for love really struck me. It helped me understand that pain and I coexist together and that we always have. We inhabit the same space and are intimately connected. Moving forward from this I have taken away the idea that the experience of pain is navigating the relationship between pain and I, sometimes there are ebbs and flows and pain takes up more of our shared space.”—@jro_joe
“Thinking about the fig symbolism at the end- Fig is a symbol of unity, understanding, truth. Does pain seek the truth and understanding?”—@liebschutz
“Pain is so much more than a number and plays so many roles in a person's life. Not every patient can express it as poetically, but we healthcare providers really ought to at least try to get a sense of the nuances.”— @DanielEison
About this #MedHumChat
“What Pain Wants” was paired with “Smiling Through Gritted Teeth,” a painting by Judy Chicago, for a #MedHumChat discussion September 18, 2019 exploring The Emotion of Pain.
The pieces for this chat, along with the discussion questions, were selected by Anna Leahy.
About the Author
Sonya Huber is a writer and activist living with rheumatoid disease who teaches in the Department of English at Fairfield University. Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines including The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post Magazine. You can learn more about her here.