Whoever said that pain is temporary....

....didn't tell the whole story.

Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor, famously said, "Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever." Sure Lance, you are right, pain does not have residence in every moment of our lives, it increases and decreases in severity, and in the most precious of moments, it does not exist at all. If only it was pain itself that was the most unnerving, but it is not. Pain is bearable; it is the indefiniteness of pain that is unsettling. Not knowing when this unpleasant feeling is going to leave you is utterly demoralizing. And on the rare occasions that you are without pain, you cannot enjoy it, because you are too fearful of how long you have until the pain is back. For all of us who are chronically living with pain, we know it is a vicious cycle, dominated by the existence and non-existence of sheer agony.

Personally, I find that a lot of my friends and family try to understand what I am going through; they try to know what my life is like. I would never wish for anyone to be able to know what I experience; for one to know chronic pain and illness, they must experience it personally, and there is no individual I would have suffer that kind of existence. It is a lonely battle that I fight daily. Pain is indescribable. It is a feeling, with an individual capacity that no two people share. My pain will never be the same as your pain and the scale by which it is measured is relative. Pain is an experience. It is motivating, not in the inspirational sense, rather, it causes us to avoid similar experiences in the future and protect ourselves from further damage. Pain is as much psychological as it is physical; it's intensity can, at times, be tempered by a pleasant diversion (be it an analgesic, a friend, a funny joke, a good movie, or a beautiful song). There are times when it is so strong that it modulates the experience of your life; for me, I have found that the times when I am in pain, I have trouble concentrating on any one thing or remembering what went on during that time. It is almost synonymous to someone "blacking out" after consuming a great deal of alcohol, and being unable to recall prior events. Yet I, without any drugs or alcohol at all, have the same loss of memory, without any help. For a while, I thought that I was becoming rather stupid, being unable to recall the most simple of thoughts; until I realized it's relation to my condition. One advantage is that I can watch a new movie recurrently and still feel as though I'm seeing it for the first time. Splendid! There are few advantages, but every moment that I feel pain, I know that I am still alive, and that is enough, because life is the greatest uncertainty. Keep living.