The pain seeps through my body like a basement flood, creeping along carpets and baseboards until the whole mess is cold and ruined. I’ve had this chronic pain disorder – as-yet undiagnosed, though many of my doctors have ideas – for about four years now, and it just grows steadily worse. I am tired, and scared, and getting older.
The pain is like the deepest part of the sensation of stubbing your toe or crashing your shin against something hard: that bone-adjacent, sickening throb that feels like it’s radiating from inside your body. It shows up in my hands, wrists, ankles, calves, knees, hips… wherever it pleases. Sometimes it seems to spread to my brain, which gets foggy and slow on high pain days, like my CPU is being throttled by just handling all that input. Even now, writing this newsletter is a glacial process of stop-and-start, tapping out a word or two, pausing, having a thought, forgetting it, and trying to keep going.
But this is supposed to be a newsletter about sex and kink and relationships, not boring stuff like body aches, which brings me to BDSM’s role in my pain management.
If you’re familiar with my work, you might expect me to say something here about how good pain helps offset bad pain; how the endorphins released during a solid spanking can calm down my nervous system and push out all those ugly sensations. This is, to some extent, true, but it presupposes I’m well enough to get hit in the first place. Holding myself up on my hands and knees, or even flipping over onto my front, can be a frustrating and agonizing process when my body hurts this badly. No, I’m not anticipating a beating today; I don’t even want one.