born with pain built in
born with pain built in
on our dark insides
cn: slight gore, mentions of transphobia
When my mum was at university in Newcastle, she spent most of her time with medical students. She told me how, in their first year, they were all paired with someone who had died and in their will donated their body to science, from whom they would learn all of human anatomy. When my mum told me about this I recoiled at first, protesting that surely there should have been a less brutal, more modern way to do that, even in the 90s. But maybe there is no better way to understand the body than its slow, deliberate unspooling. At the end of the year, they would go to the funeral - they had spent months and months with that person, knowing them intimately but at the same time, not at all.
In her essay Guts for the White Review, Julia Armfield writes about “the fact of knowing and not knowing, the sense of the body as self and as something altogether different; as you but also as something liable to attack you, to harbour things that mean you harm… How do you square that – the fact of the physical dark inside you?” I return to her words, again and again. Famously, I’ve never been good at unknowns, at surrendering control; the idea that my physical self is a strangely shaped room without windows, doors, or light is, to me, literal body horror. Maybe that’s why I bite the skin around my hands so much - tiny chinks in the brickwork.
In the philosophy of mind, mind-body dualism is the principle that the mental and the physical can be separated into a neat dichotomy. The body is an impermanent home for the soul, then, leaving us “the ghost in the machine”, as Gilbert Ryle (a strong critic of the idea) put it. I understand the impulse behind this theory, the urge to pretend that our intellect somehow severs us from the physical fact of ourselves, from our existence as human animals. It’s scary and confusing to fully comprehend otherwise. If your brain takes up just two percent of your body weight, then that means the rest of you is unconscious, like how 80% of the ocean is unexplored; we carry a darkness with us at all times, and it is not ours to understand. It’s all you - the thin blood that comes when you cut yourself shaving, the brittle white curls you tear off when you bite your nails, the gristly parts of your breast which could be fibrocystic changes or benign cysts or cancer but also could just be your normal breasts. We talk about illness as if it is separate to the body - something alien to fight - but so often it is that unconscious dark turning on itself, and therefore on you. “To watch a horror movie is to know that something bad is going to happen,” Armfield writes. “To have a body is really the same thing.”
Armfield’s piece for the White Review centred around her harrowing experience with a 35cm-long ovarian cyst, an intruder she had been living with for months, maybe even years before diagnosis and surgery. She writes about the body as a site of horror, a home for a parasite or monster living in that dark, feeding off you, undetected. But there is equal horror, I think in finding nothing there as there is in finding something; of hearing ghostly creaks and whispers in the attic and then pulling back the curtain to find empty space.
My pain tolerance is high, is the thing; I got my sternum tattooed without flinching; as a child, when I was hit in the playground, I reacted with indignant surprise, not hurt. But sometimes a black hole opens in my lower stomach and the rest of me collapses into it. No one knows why this happens, so I’m supposed to be okay with it, and carry cocodamol with me at all times. The first time it happened was me and Rosa’s six month anniversary, two years ago, and we were out for lunch with our friend Eve, who’d set us up in the first place. I remember we’d held hands outside Westminster Cathedral a few hours earlier and gotten a disturbed look from an older man, then heard him turn to his companions and say, the thing about young people these days is… though he was out of our earshot before he finished his sentence. Shortly after we’d left the restaurant I felt like I needed to sit down again, so we went to a Costa and bought a bottle of water just to claim a table, and then I felt like I needed to throw up, so I locked myself in the disabled toilet, and then the chasm opened, and I thought I was going to die.
I ended up on the floor, my cheek flush against the linoleum, actively writhing, dodging the pain as it tried to pin me down. Rosa had gotten into the bathroom, but I wasn’t sure how, I was delirious; I remembered the other day I had seen a fox on the road that had been run over, half intact fox half guts stuck jammy on the hot black tarmac, dented with tyre marks. Other cars were running it over and drove off with fox blood on their wheels. Whenever I closed my eyes or blinked I saw the fox. Its eyes were open, jaw twisted, still smiling.
There was a knock at the door. Can you get on with it, came a woman’s voice from outside. Rosa cracked the door open and said, my girlfriend is in here and she’s very ill. But I need the loo, the woman said. She tried to barge her way in, and Rosa physically blocked her. One of the baristas arrived and asked if we should call an ambulance, and I nodded from the floor, thankful to have someone acknowledge this as the Big Deal it was.
Rosa was stroking my hair and shushing me, saying, do you think that homophobic old man cursed us, but she sounded a thousand miles away, my pulse was thick in my ears. Nothing outside the borders of my body felt real. I could still taste the remnants of lunch, and my tongue kept laving over the bits of dead bird between my teeth, which I realised then was quite literally what they were, I had the taste of an animal in my mouth. If I wanted, I could go and buy more dead animal parts, wrapped up in plastic at the convenience store. The chicken lodged in my incisors and those dead fox guts and my body were made of the same stuff, most of the same stuff really.
They decided to wait twenty minutes or so before calling 999, in which time the black hole sealed itself up and disappeared as quickly as it had come. I managed to walk fifty tentative paces to the taxi we’d flagged down, a black cab, which felt absolutely ludicrous; we spent the rest of the day in bed, Rosa reading Normal People to me and trying to do an Irish accent whenever Connell had dialogue, to make me laugh. The old man’s curse hadn’t ended, incidentally. The next day I felt well enough to go out for our six-month anniversary dinner at a little tapas place and shortly before we asked for the bill, Rosa began having rapid, sudden heart palpitations. The waiter brought over two tiny vials of dessert wine with the cheque; Rosa was calling her mother outside, so I downed them both. We went to St. George’s A and E, which was somehow deserted for possibly the only time ever, and they wouldn’t let me in with her so instead I sat around in an empty reception deep in the windowless gut of the hospital. She had an ECG and the results were fine. We walked back to my parents’ house, laughing in that incredulous, relieved way that comes when you have just been bound tighter by disaster, both of our bodies misfiring for no reason but still in one piece and working well enough to drag ourselves home.
I wasn’t sure how to describe how it felt to the GP; the way we talk about pain is so subjective, so muddied by metaphor, that me saying, it hurt a lot, it was agony, it felt awful, meant very little to her. Painful cramps at points in your cycle are normal, she said, implying, I suppose, that this was my default, that I was born with this hot, screaming cry for attention inside me. In the end all the evidence suggested she was right. I waited four months for an ultrasound and blood tests which found nothing; I didn’t have an intruder; what I felt was natural. Meanwhile the pain came and went three times, each time so strong it felt like it was anchoring me to some deeper earth beyond my body, its weight like a plant growing backwards, longing for roots. For answers.
Oppression loves the concept of the natural; the “natural” body, family, population of a country. It underpins so much, from tradwives swearing by a diet of butter and beef tallow to the online backlash against SSRIs and birth control to moral panic about medical transition to draconian anti-immigration laws. By this logic there is “natural” pain, pain which is inbuilt into a body or mind or population or geopolitical system, which is unfortunate but necessary, or even moral. This sacrifices so much - the right to an abortion has, in the US, become precarious or in some places non-existent; anti-trans laws operate on the idea that what was in someone’s body when they were born should dictate for life who they are and how they move in the world. Faceless keyboard warriors spend hours on Mumsnet forums after their kids are in bed, demanding that politicians define “man” and “woman” assigned sex at birth, which must never, ever be changed.
Perhaps there is an easy explanation to why some trans-exclusionary radical “feminists” are blasé about collaborating with conservative, anti-abortion organisations - an insistence that you do not get to run from womanhood, the curse of it, the hurt of it. So often, TERFs online will accuse trans women of never knowing the agony of childbirth, of endometriosis or PCOS or standard period pain, and claim that this inexperience renders womanhood inaccessible to them. But by this logic, womanhood demands painful initiation - period cramps, sexual harassment from age 10 or younger, pregnancy scares. It operates on the offensive fallacy that trans women do not experience misogyny or oppression on the basis of being women. But there is also a slippage here between saying Women often feel pain they shouldn’t have to, and A woman is someone who feels pain. What is the point of asking what a woman is when the answer leaves us wounded by default?
The reality is that institutions, governments, corporations have the power to decide whose pain is acceptable - in wars and at home, at work and on operating tables. Our work is to protest for a future where no-one’s is. I am not interested in a womanhood which relies on pain, where pain becomes intrinsic to the definition, just as we are told it is intrinsic to our bodies. I am not interested, as Ursula le Guin put it, in “[feeling] blindly while men get to think.” I don’t care for pain as virtue, or righteous, or necessary. I would rather turn a torch in on myself, and know everything.
Thank you for reading <3 This essay had been in the works vaguely for almost a year, I think - let me know your thoughts in the comments!
also I know rage shouldn’t be inherent to womanhood… but I do have a really good playlist called women who scream:
The title immediately made me think of Belinda's monologue in Fleabag, was that the inspiration? I'm just so incredibly in awe of your writing, I think you're brilliant!
“Oppression loves the concept of the natural; the “natural” body, family, population of a country.” Yes. Thanks for summing that up more eloquently than my vague inner monologue of “They say ‘natural’ like it’s a good thing… hell, cancer is ‘natural’. Why am I supposed to bow down to ‘natural’?”