Living With Chronic Pain Teaches You to Ignore the Haters
/By Crystal Lindell
When I first started having chronic pain in 2013, one of the major hurdles I faced was that I suddenly had a lot of trouble handling my full-time job. Doing a 90 minute commute each way, managing stress, traveling for conferences – all of it became infinitely more difficult.
A lot of bosses probably would have immediately started to look for ways to let me go at that point, but I was lucky enough to have one who didn’t. He was an incredible mentor, friend and advocate for me – both within the company and with third parties.
In fact, I would often rave about him to others, bragging about how empathetic and compassionate he was about the whole situation.
A few years later, my boss started to have really bad knee pain, to the point that he eventually needed a knee replacement.
Before he could have the surgery though, we had to cover a week-long industry conference at an exhibition hall together, and the whole experience left him very drained. He was suddenly experiencing chronic pain.
Near the end of the week our team was having dinner, and he leaned over to tell me something.
“I’m sorry I was not more compassionate to you about your health problems. It’s so awful. I go to bed tired, I wake up tired. The pain is always there. It’s horrible. I should have been nicer,” he told me.
I was stunned.
This was someone who I had always categorized as being among the most compassionate about my chronic pain. And here he was – now faced with it himself – feeling as though he should have been even nicer.
I always point to that story when I talk about why I don’t take it personally when others judge how I manage my life with chronic pain. Until you’ve been through it, it’s really hard to truly understand what it’s like to live with it – and what you’d do to make it stop.
Even the most compassionate people often find that they were not compassionate enough. That it’s worse than they previously understood.
And most people are not compassionate. On the contrary, over the years a lot of people have been really judgemental about my health choices. People love to offer unsolicited advice, talk behind my back, and make rude comments like these:
“She just wants to get high all day.”
“If you really wanted to get better you’d take up running/yoga/pilates and lose weight.”
“How bad could it be? She’s just lazy.”
But one thing I’ve noticed repeatedly is that when life hands them a health problem of their own, they are quickly humbled.
People who thought I wasn’t doing enough to get better suddenly feel overwhelmed by something as routine as an MRI.
People who thought I took too many pain pills suddenly ask me for tips on how to get their doctor to prescribe pain medication.
People who sneered at my kratom use suddenly want a tutorial on how to use it.
People who called me childish for advocating for universal health care suddenly realize that the health insurance industry doesn’t care if they live or die.
And people who thought I wasn’t doing enough to further my career quit their jobs and stopped working altogether.
To be honest, I get it. It’s really hard to conceptualize a life with chronic pain or any chronic health issue until it happens to you. And it’s easy to judge how someone else is handling it.
So when they are humbled, I never say “I told you so.” Instead, I offer sympathy, and whatever advice they ask for.
And I tell them the most important thing you can tell someone with chronic pain: You are not crazy, you are not alone, and you can still live a very fulfilling life regardless of your health issues.
Before that happens though, before they are humbled, when they are still healthy and offering judgements, I do something else – I ignore them. Because I know that no matter what they say, they wouldn’t handle my chronic pain any better than I do.
To quote one of the most famous song writers of our generation:
“Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. I shake it off, I shake it off.”
