Pain is invisible and often quiet. Silence around pain is something I am working to change. This project aims to give voice to those who live in chronic pain so that they might feel less alone.

There are over 50 million people in the United States who live in chronic pain, and 1.5 billion in the world. Of those, more than 60% of them are women. I am one of those women. My aim is to tell an in depth and honest narrative of what it is like to live a life in pain. I have learned that it is different for everyone. I have learned that the arc of my experience is particular only to me, and the arcs of others, uniquely theirs. But despite the differences, I have come to understand that some universal truths remain: chronic pain makes life immensely difficult, and it does not go away.

Pain is isolating. The battle is on the inside - constant, and relentless, often indescribable, and always exhausting. Pain distances us from those we love, igniting cynicism, depression, and loneliness.  Pain doesn’t care where you come from, whom you love, where you work, or what you believe in. It just keeps showing up, demanding we pay attention. In that paying attention we can often feel like no one in the world can understand us. That we are alone in this.

Recently, I have started listening more - especially to people in pain. What I have found is that there are a lot of us. There are more people in chronic pain in my everyday life than I ever imagined. For me, knowing this has been liberating in a way I didn’t expect. I have lived inside the centrifuge of my own pain for so long I didn’t realize I didn’t have to be in there all alone. Hearing stories of other people’s pain has brought me to a new place in which I can imagine a future of acceptance for all of us. I can’t take anyone’s pain away, but maybe in giving voice to those in pain, and rooting their stories in the complex context in which we live, I can remove for others some of the loneliness and shame that comes along with it.