Surely Not — Ryan Condon

This is a post I made on my personal blog last year about my experience with chronic pain. I wanted to share it here as I'm quite proud of it, and the concept of "The Work" I reference in it has very close ties to how I view the process of getting better at Magic - As I was writing my paid article this week I found myself wanting to reference it, but first it has to be viewable on Patreon, so here ya go!

There's risk, I guarantee. When there's skin, you tend to bleed.

It's a rainy weekend. Perfect for writing. I've been trying to write something about the experience of chronic pain for a very long time, but every time I've tried, it's been impossible to get down every thread that's in my mind in a way that feels both honest and expansive enough. I've started and stopped a few times. I think today I'm going to try to go all the way, and if I can't get there, leave something behind that will let me keep climbing up when I have the energy to come back to it.

It's this feeling I want to start with -- Because this is the feeling I have when I try to talk about my pain, the feeling I preemptively imagine in the reader or listener. The structural understanding is there. Everybody knows what the word chronic means, and everybody understands what the experience of pain feels like, but I can't deny that combining them together is conceptually and emotionally difficult. I know this because this is how I felt before, and still feel sometimes, when someone tries to explain their personal experience of marginalization on an axis I don't face - If you gave me truth serum, I could imagine how difficult their experience was, but what I couldn't do was comfortably square that with the frameworks I currently had for viewing the world and my place in it. It's the feeling I get, and I imagine other white people get when we read about Black people's experiences with police brutality. The idea that someone ostensibly imbued with the consent and approval of your friends and neighbors to "protect the peace" would see you as a threat so dangerous that he needs to kneel on your neck for nine and a half minutes while you're begging for your own breath - All over a $20 bill - is too frightening, too much to process. The part of you that grasps at empathy knows you're grasping at something so daunting that you can't possibly hold it all at once and still feel grounded & safe. So you pull away, instinctively protecting yourself from the attempt to fully imagine what it must be like to go through something like that. Maybe the situation was different than it sounds. Maybe the world is simpler, easier, and I'm just not smart enough to rationalize why yet. Surely not.

Stay with me. I think this is a feeling we encounter a lot, even in lower stakes contexts, and I've been recognizing it more and more recently. Let's take a step back to childhood, when the world was both simpler and more confusing.

Do you remember what multiplying numbers felt like when you first learned how to do it?

348 X 72

195 X 177

1000 X 100

How would you attempt to do each of those in your head? The last one's easier, right?

But why? Seriously -- What kind of knowledge do we have that makes that one easier?

I remember being told by a classmate in first grade that he could multiply any number by a thousand. I didn't believe him. How could a kid my age possibly hold each of the individual values that make up a THOUSAND, and not only that, but process through every micro-transaction that makes up a multiplication of that huge number, even by something as small as, say, 2?

Of course, we're in on the joke now. We know that there's a simple rule for multiplying by a thousand: You add three zeroes to the end. Any number multiplied by a thousand is just a thousand OF that number. 2 * 1000 is just "two thousand".

How did we figure out that rule? If it didn't come "a priori" to my 6-year-old self, I don't think it's some kind of built-in law of the universe that should be self-evident to anyone. This rule is a byproduct of our tens-based number system, a system that we invented to describe the world and has survived because of its useful applications.

While we were building this number system that was so useful for describing the world, we started to notice patterns in it. Someone probably had a hunch about one of these patterns -- But I really don't think it would have felt obvious to them, like knowledge handed down from heaven. No, I think someone had to do the hard, brute force work of validating that knowledge: Setting out two groups of ten stones, counting one by one until she got to twenty, then setting out another group of ten, counting from the beginning again until she reached thirty... on, and on. It probably took an entire afternoon, and then another week to figure out whether the pattern held for hundreds and thousands. Until the pattern started to feel like such a natural part of the world that it wasn't even worth doubting. I bet her hands got tired.

Of course, the actual process might have been different than that. It's only speculation/metaphor. I know it sounds kind of crazy, but the more I've thought about it, and reflected on my own experiences of producing valuable work in the world, the more I believe useful knowledge about patterns in the world - The kind of knowledge that allows us to generalize from tens to thousands, from examples to rules, from a particular interaction with law enforcement to everything encompassed by the phrase police brutality, is only produced by such painstaking, meticulous, effortful work. The trick is that the incredible amount of work becomes hidden after we've done it. It becomes the most valuable and the most dangerous type of "knowledge" -- Knowledge that's almost invisible to us now, knowledge that feels like it was handed down from heaven because it works without fuss on its own, because it helps us avoid the difficult manual processing.

This is how I've felt about my experience with chronic pain. I know there is some knowledge written in the afternoons where all I could do is lay on my bed and feel guilty that I couldn't do simple tasks at work - but trying to extract the pattern from that experience is daunting.

I think the case of the rock-counter is a valuable lesson for how to move forward when you find yourself in a spot like the one I'm in now. When you can almost picture a pattern, but you haven't quite gotten your net around it yet to capture & tame it, and trying to do so feels impossible.

Try to notice it the next time you feel this feeling. Maybe there's a problem at work that you know you need to solve, but you don't even have a good idea of where to start yet. Maybe you've been feeling inexplicably down for a while, but it's slowly getting harder to ignore and you need a friend's help to process it. Maybe you read an incisive article about climate change and are hit with that paralyzing mixture of outrage, fear, guilt, and inspiration all at the same time, and don't know how to go to sleep. Maybe a friend is explaining the rules of a complicated board game that you just can't quite follow yet (my favorite example).

We don't always have the ability, in the moment or more generally, to address this feeling (which is why not everyone is always up for a game night). Most of the time, you have a more pressing need, whether it's to feed yourself, take care of a crying kid, or get a good night's sleep. Still -- staring down the long, draining, intimidating road towards where you want to get to is the only place you can start, because that's what the path to accomplishing difficult things looks like when you're at the beginning. Getting a glimpse of the massive difficulty required to reach your destination is a sign that you actually do understand, on some level, what it's going to require to accomplish that thing. If your subconscious can already intuit the vast amount of work it will take to distill something down into its simplest form, you're in the right place (intellectually, at least) to begin that work.

It's time to take a deep breath. Get some rest, go eat something if you're hungry. Take a walk, take a shower, do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself and make sure you're physically comfortable and capable enough to keep getting through this with me, because I'm going to ask you to do something difficult: Grappling with the complexity and heaviness of chronic pain and disability. I'm writing, you're reading. We're in this together, and I want you to be in the best situation you can be for it. We've got this. The end result will be worthwhile.

As I began writing today, the first post on this blog was still unpublished. I'm going to cannibalize it here in the interest of actually finishing it. Here's how it began:

Every day ends with exhaustion and defeat. It may have been a good day, but I always finish it by surrendering. Surrender is not always a sad thing; it can be a relief. But it's hard to keep existing when existing ends up feeling like losing.

There are places horror movies don't really go. The idea is that it's fun to feel scared, which is true to an extent. At the end of most movies though, you usually have a reasonable understanding of the 'rules' of the universe: Even if those rules are cruel and arbitrary, they still exist, and there is almost always a 'why' the characters went through the experiences they went through, 'why' the villain became this way or came into existence. There are causal mechanisms that can be described with language. The purpose of the movie is to generate an experience within the viewer, and that experience is not meant to weaken or harm them, it's meant to expose them to challenging things in a way that feels rewarding and, ultimately, safe.

It's hard for me to imagine a horror movie that successfully communicates the experience of living with chronic pain to someone who hasn't been in that situation, because I don't think the ideas that are necessary to get across are compatible with the sense of ultimate safety (and ability to disconnect) that the experience of watching a movie is supposed to inherently have. Those ideas are:

Truly arbitrary suffering happens, and it will happen to you and the people you love

Suffering is often permanent. There is no guarantee of an ending

Suffering can and does change you, but it does not necessarily change you for the better, or into a person who can overcome it

Suffering does not usually have a cause, and even when it does, that cause is generally not morally weighted and it cannot truly be "blamed"

These are not concepts that are easy to talk about or hold space for in your consciousness. They defy attempts to qualify or contextualize. They simply exist, are undeniably true, and are deeply uncomfortable to think about.

I don't want to pretend that disabled people are the only ones who know the truth. I think everyone knows these things are facts and has had to deal with them in some way.

That's all I had so far. Bleak, huh? I stand by every word of it, but I knew I wasn't done. Keep going with me while I try to finish it -- It's going to stay dark for a little bit, but I promise it will get lighter towards the end. What I was trying to communicate there was a fully honest depiction of how exhausting, oppressive, and intimidating chronic pain can feel - how it can force you to confront certain realities about existence in a way that humans are generally not very inclined to confront directly.

And yet, a glimmer of light -- There I was, trying to confront it anyways. Here we are. Let's keep going.

Let me try today to phrase some of these realities in a way that will be useful for our discussion going forward:

Bad things happen to good people, and this is not okay.

Some people experience these challenges more than others, and it actually does make them less able to do certain things (They are, literally, dis-abled)

Let me also add a third one that's relevant to what we were talking about before:

This applies to the kind of work that produces valuable things. Some people have limitations (mental, physical, psychological, socioeconomic, etc) that do and will prevent them from doing certain kinds of work more than others

This was the hardest part of processing my chronic pain for me -- The disabling. The fact that I was, in many ways, less capable than I had been before. Less capable of doing difficult work, less capable of being there for my friends and family, less capable of being there for myself. Less capable of being happy. My pain reduced, and sometimes took away entirely my ability to confront that feeling we were talking about and overcome it.

There are a lot of people who take these first three bullets and go on to add a fourth:

Because we should value people based on the impact they have on others' well-being, people who are less capable of the kinds of work that bring value to society should be subsequently valued less

It's a dark opinion, but one that makes a certain amount of sense -- If you want to avoid thinking about certain things. If you want to step back from the scary truth.

Truly arbitrary suffering happens, and it will happen to you and the people you love--Emo Ryan

How can this truth be a source of light? I can now see that this was the question I was grappling with when I first started trying to write this piece. It felt like an impossible task to justify something my heart knew to be true -- That this realization, while scary, sad, and difficult to face head-on, was also reason for tremendous joy.

I can now see the reason for that joy. It's the reason why that fourth bullet doesn't follow from the other three. The reality is that the world is scary, difficult, and even unjust - we experience this struggle and suffering in unevenly distributed ways. But boy, does it get distributed. Don't you worry about getting your portion. We are all those limited people. Each of us has our own limits and our own arbitrary suffering -- Some more visible, and some more impactful on how we must move through this world -- But as gut-wrenching as it can be to focus on, each of us both have them, and have them in unequal ways. “Suffering is unjust and unavoidable” means we are not the same, but we are not alone. You can’t have one without the other. The road is not easy and you are not uniquely equipped to travel it light of foot - If you think you are, you're deluding yourself.

Our entire world is built on the hard work of taking chaos and complexity and turning them into structure and systems that help us all live a more fulfilling and better life. It can be easy to assume that this means people who are more visibly and materially disabled or marginalized are less valuable in the project of creating this structure. But I think this assumption comes from the same feeling we all get when beginning the actual work. The terror of seeing the path ahead clearly and knowing the number of steps it will take to follow it, or the fact that yes, you are one of the people who has to take that journey as well. The knowledge that even what we can see ahead of us is only an infinitesimal slice, just one part of a long and winding road we won't see the end of. The admission that the work is, inescapably relevant to us and, at the same time, inescapably bigger than us.

Let's take a quick break to look at some Pinterest art & bop out to some tunes. I'm sure you've seen this quote across the internet. It's a really damn good quote which has been used in many different ways. However, the original, and often-forgotten meaning is what's most useful here.

Trying to keep it as simple as possible, my best understanding of what Lauren Thatcher Ulrich was trying to say when she first wrote this phrase down is that women are often the true builders and Workers of humanity's great achievements -- But this work is often invisible or miscredited, and those who truly do the heavy lifting of moving our society forward are not the ones we see in history books. See this wonderful article for a more in-depth explanation.

The way that the original author and original intent of this statement have nearly been lost in our popular imagination is, in my opinion, a looking glass into the process by which we sublimate the true engines of progress in our world. Let's look at these engines again through the eyes of another artist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5goBGXUVKkk

Cause if you're gonna do the work then it's gotta be honest,

Because the best of us have all already been forgotten

And if you're in it for the recognition I hate to disappoint but if you do it right you'll never get it

Yo, we don't remember the farmer,

We remember the fruit

We don't remember the inventor

We remember the boom

The impact through the eons

So I know what side of history I wanna be on

Guante, Matches

This is one of my favorite songs ever, and at this point I hope it's easy to see why. It's the best distillation of my view of history, humanity, and the meaning of life I've ever encountered in a piece of art. The world is scary, and dark, and big -- we may never see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we're here, we're together, and we're prepared to start walking. We brought some motherfucking matches.

At the end of the day, the idea that we should value people according to traditional notions of "ability" (as opposed to "dis-ability") is wrong for two reasons.

The first reason is a bit obvious. The idea that we should value people according to their ability to contribute gets the whole thing backwards. The entire purpose of our "abilities" is building those systems and structures which give people safety, meaning, comfort and community. The goal is the people, not the work. Valuing work over the people that do it and benefit from it is a misunderstanding rooted in fear. Valuing the fight against pain and struggle because you fear the thing being fought against is wrong (I can't believe I'm writing myself into quoting Star Wars). The struggle isn't valuable because of its difficulty, or even because of its impact. In fact, the struggle itself isn't valuable at all -- But the one who struggles is worth everything. In othering ourselves from those who we can see struggling more than us, we gain a feeling of psychological safety, and in the same stroke, we lose a part of our worth.

The second reason follows from this realization, and is what I really wanted to climb this mountain with you for. It turns out, the idea that material disability translates to existential disability is laughably, tragically wrong. Creating & sustaining people who can overcome difficult obstacles that come from their unjust and arbitrary limitations is a great way of protecting the kind of grit and perseverance that we all need when engaging in The Work.

Not "work", like the kind of stuff that gets you money and fame and notifications on LinkedIn, but The Work. What "well-behaved women" do, what the forgotten farmer did. The work of the rock-counter. Listening to your partner vent after a long day even though you've had one too. Helping your 2-year-old manage a tantrum without breaking down yourself. Tackling a decades-unsolved problem in Math despite recently having gone through a difficult breakup. Hefting a spotlight on the contributions of unsung women throughout history, even though you know that spotlight will continue to avoid you as it avoided them. Writing training and documentation that will make it easier for the person who gets hired after you to succeed at your job. Getting sporadic updates from your friend who's been going through some health problems but doesn't have the energy to keep everyone informed all the time (thank you Mora, Derek, Alicia, Kara, Max, Jonah, Joe, Shivam, Lauren, Benji, Callum & Mo, Christine, & many more). Sitting with your son while he explains that the best thing you can do to help him with his chronic pain is to process the grief that comes with it on your own (thank you mom & dad).

I knew all of this on some level before I became a prisoner of chronic pain, before I had to explicitly confront the ways that it caused my ability to fall short from meeting the expectations of society and the expectations I had for myself. "Matches" has been my favorite song since senior year of High School. However, I don't think I could have written this piece then. That doesn't mean my suffering was morally good, or that we should preserve suffering because it "makes us stronger". It means that we should work to reduce my suffering because more will always come, and because I am worthy of receiving that love. It means that I now have some additional ability to understand the suffering of others. It means it is in the best interests of our society to accommodate and support others going through similar suffering, so that they have the space to do their Work. The desire to remove or ignore these people is, at its core, a push for false simplicity over true complexity caused by the desire for comfort over truth. It is exactly the opposite of what we need to build a better world.