The Whole Mess
Notes from the middle of everything
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about
Collector of contradictions, student of imperfection, and occasional meditator. Writing from the messy middle with equal parts honesty and humor.
Category: chronic pain
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I’ve never settled for the pink-washing of my experience. Even with the best of possible outcomes, my cancer story has been gruesome, painful, and arduous. It’s also been full of unexpected beauty and eroticism. The idea of being a “survivor”, while helpful to many who need the narrative to get through the ordeal, feels problematic…
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It sneaks up on me… just a twinge, slight pressure rumbling just beneath the surface. Realization hits me on a subconscious level, not quite aware of what some part of me already knows is on the way.
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My writing does not claim a definitive answer—nor could it. Chronic pain resists containment. Its instability is not a theoretical failure, but a reflection of pain’s own shifting, context-dependent nature.
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The limitations I have discussed led me to consider an alternative perspective. One that neither fully internalizes nor externalizes suffering. Buddhist philosophy and practice offer a way to honor the deeply personal experience of chronic pain without framing it as a problem to be fixed. Rather than positioning pain as an individual defect or a…
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While the social model of disability reframes disablement as a product of structural barriers, it still does not fully account for the embodied experience of pain. Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of “misfitting” provides an alternative to the social model’s assumption that disability is purely a product of external barriers. Instead of treating disability as a fixed…
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While my battle to have my impairments recognized and their debilitating nature treated, I must acknowledge that how those impairments interact with the environment around me is also part of my disablement. The social model of disability asserts that disability is caused by societal barriers, not by impairment itself. Under this model, a person is…
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Becoming “chronically pained” (Sheppard, 2020) is not immediate. It is a slow process that unfolds over time. Many chronic pain patients initially assume their pain is temporary, only to realize its permanence slowly. This “time of undiagnosis” (Kafer, 2013) can be disorienting and emotionally draining. Patients are often denied recognition, dismissed, and left without answers…
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Disability Studies debates whether disablement is located in the individual, the environment, or somewhere in between. In this section, I will explore my personal experiences of disablement within my academic experiences while attempting to locate where my disablement rests on this spectrum of liminality. This debate mirrors Wendell’s (1996) argument that while social factors shape…
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Before delving into my argument, I must first situate myself by sharing my relationship to disability and the challenges of locating my disablement. Disablement is inherently unstable, shifting depending on social, medical, and internal conditions. My experience exists at the intersection of impairment and external barriers, shaped by both privilege and marginalization. These tensions are…
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I’m going to spend the next several posts going through a final paper that I wrote for my previous course on Disability Studies in Theory and Practice. I wanted to examine the liminal space I find myself in as a disabled person with chronic pain.