Acknowledging your pain will lead to healthier relationships

Support group has played a big role in healing

Not long ago, someone new walked into my life and started to show me what it means to be genuinely honest about who they are. It is something very beautiful that I feel constantly blessed to watch unfold. This person has made me realize the way 90 per cent of the rest of the world hides behind the most pitiful personas showcased on the internet. This person has made me realize my worth, and solidified my choices for clearing the air of toxic relationships that consisted of these kinds of people in my past.

Tonight, as I type away in my mom’s best friend’s downtown Toronto home, I am hunched over in a cot with warm quilts, feeling the chronic pain radiate through my bones. I am instantly thrown back to the conversation I had with this person just nights before, and am coming to terms with how dishonest I have been about one aspect of my life. My pain. Not just with this person either, but with nearly every person I’ve had ties with.

For five years now, I have lived with this invisible disability that accompanies my visible amputation. There is great difficulty in living in such a state of corporeal pain that weighs into mental pain; not enough people are empathetic of the power it takes to lift your own spirits because your own exploitation feels like a burden.

If you’re like me, reading this with pain buzzing through your body like a beehive trapped in your head, you aren’t alone. It is valid and worth the time to invest in being open about your pain, so others can help you through it.

If you’re an ally of someone like me, you’ll be curious to know more about why honesty in pain is so crucial to successful relationships.

I’m very grateful to have had this conversation with my partner, not just for the sake of my growth with him, but for furthering my own self-acceptance and expansion. The only person I have ever been truly honest with is my mom. And until this recent conversation, I hadn’t even really realized she was my single confidante in the most core aspects of my life. This isn’t a bad thing, though, it’s simply because when sickness descended on me again in my teen years, she and my dad were the only ones who loved and supported me without limits. And every day since, that has continued.

Because I have had so many relationships with people come and gone, the dawning realization they were only really interested in being supportive of me because of who I was bearing great sorrow on my heart. This, and having been medicalized for so long, every time I shared information about my pain has felt like a tokenization, so it’s hard to grow accustomed to sharing for the purpose of propelling affection forward. Maybe you, reader,

‘This person has made me realize my worth’

understand where I’m coming from. Perhaps you’ve been a victim of tokenization yourself.

Being in Toronto this evening, I am struck with the reminder that it’s because I attend my youth cancer survivor group on Tuesdays. This group is helping me heal in all the ways I’d hoped it would. I am grateful to have this support, and the reminder to keep mindful awareness as part of my daily routine is ataractic.

I am reminded by the little notes I keep for myself that today is the most important day of my life, simply because it is all I really have. It is with this that I flourish the courage to be 100 per cent genuine with my embodiment.