Pain Bodies in Painful Times

my bed

I know it’s been a while since I wrote.

It took more than a minute to come back from Ireland — from our Queer Disabled Visions residency at Live Art Ireland. It took a long time to recover. Then the holidays came, and back to weekly therapy, which makes me unwell.

And with them, the news. So much news.

Especially for those of us who are tuned in —

tuned in through social media,

through friends,

through our empathic bodies,

through the ancestors,

through the land,

through the universe,

through experience,

through our present bodies,

through our fear for the future.

It’s been a roller coaster for me. December and January feel like one long, tedious month. I don’t have a routine. I don’t even know how I’m going to wake up — good spirits, depression, pain, grief, dread, numbness. Day to day, I don’t know what I’ll be able to manage tomorrow.

I still face a lot of uncertainty here in Germany. But there’s even more uncertainty back home in the United States. It’s become evident to me that I’m at a point where I can’t go back — and it’s still not clear whether I can stay here in Germany either.

My daily routine revolves around my health. My number one focus, since my accident in the summer of 2021, has been getting better. Getting better so I can live again. So I can have more choices in my life than simply staying somewhere because I need healthcare.

I’m not there yet.

So I’m on this roller coaster — dealing with a painful body, and dealing with painful news.

I don’t fully understand why, in this lifetime, I’ve been so viscerally and physically affected by what I witness happening in the world. Maybe it’s my time in Palestine. Maybe it’s my time in Greenland. Maybe it’s being a Native person from a country that continues to harm Indigenous people while pretending otherwise. Maybe it’s living in a moment when my tribe, The Lumbee Nation of North Carolina, receives federal recognition in a political climate I never imagined witnessing. Maybe it’s just that my nervous system has never really known safety.

And then there are the Epstein files.

I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t even realize there was a release of more Epstein files. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with daily news cycles now. But there it was, sliding into my Instagram feed between puppies and artist opportunities — Palestine, Greenland, Minneapolis, LA, and then headlines about Epstein again.

As someone who comes from a background of sexual trauma and predatory patriarchy, I was not prepared for what that would stir up in me.

And then I was left alone with it.

My pain body jumped in.

My face. My jaw. My mouth. My heart. My arms, my hands, my legs, my feet.

Pain.

That night, I dreamed men were attacking me, one at a time, methodically. I had nothing to defend myself with except my own body. I woke up exhausted, shaken, and hurting in places that had nothing to do with physical injury and everything to do with memory.

It feels like this is part of our collective existence right now. And for those of us who are disabled, chronically ill, in chronic pain, or navigating medical systems while already emotionally maxed out — we’re expected to digest this through our social feeds and… move on with our day.

I’m not doing that anymore.

I’ve never really had the luxury to stop and recognize what has happened to me. The gravity of it. The ways my body has carried it all.

As a very young girl, I was pulled into sexual exploitation. Alcohol. Coercion. Being used and recorded. That was my introduction to relationships, to power, to what men could take. And I’ve watched that pattern echo through my life again and again in different forms.

For most of my life, I survived by drinking, by keeping secrets, by pushing everything down into my body because girls learn very early that we are not believed. That their pain is inconvenient. That our quality of life doesn’t matter in systems that are not built for us.

So when these stories resurface in the news — when powerful men’s abuses become headlines and then disappear again — it doesn’t feel abstract. It feels cellular. It feels like my body is being asked to relive something it never got to finish processing the first time.

I used to think strength meant pushing through. Business as usual. Productivity as proof of worth.

But some of us don’t have the capacity for that anymore—especially those of us living in pain bodies during painful times.

Some days, surviving the news is all we can do.

Some days, tending to our nervous systems is resistance.

Some days, choosing not to look — or choosing to look and then lie down — is the most honest response we have.

I don’t have neat conclusions right now. I don’t have a five-step plan for resilience. What I have is a growing refusal to abandon my body to keep up with a world that runs on harm and speed.

Maybe this is what healing looks like at this stage: less endurance, more truth.

less numbing, more feeling — even when it’s messy, inconvenient, or slow.

We are living through painful times. Some of us are doing it in painful bodies. And that changes what “coping” looks like. It changes what’s possible. It changes what survival asks of us.

I’m learning to let that be real.

I’m learning to let that be enough for today, because that is all I can do.