Is the pain you feel normal?

A little while ago, my physical therapist asked me: “Is your pain level normal?”, when discussing progress with my frozen shoulder. I think most people would interpret this question as: “What level of pain are you feeling right now, and is that level acceptable?” and answer with something like “4 out of 10”.
I knew how they intended it, instead, and they knew I’d understand.

Part of my input/output, with regards to emotional and or physical (dis)comfort, is the fact that in my gender dysphoria and trying to deal with the simultaneous subconscious feeling of “I do not feel safe” I dealt with, I had removed “feeling” altogether. No feelings in. Or out.

Physical pain? Enter Monty Python’s Black Knight: “‘Tis but a scratch!” For a long time , I walked around with an untreated root canal, until my then partner told me they didn’t want to deal with it anymore, and told me to go get it fixed; or four major surgeries with general anaesthesia, where the only “pain” I felt was some muscle ache in my calves from being in stirrups for 10 hours, and once I felt a bit nauseous when I tried to sit up in bed a few hours after my third surgery inside a 4-month timeframe. There was no real difference between “I bumped my knee” and “the outside temperature is low”. It resulted in sensory input, and I catalogued it.
Emotional pain? Flatline. No more, no less. My (“emotional” would be expected here) response to “Happy birthday!” and “I am so sorry, someone you care about passed away” was the same… Bleak, with a variation of social nicety or polite acknowledgement that basically meant “okay, message received”.

And the same goes for that physical injury I’ve been dealing with for about a year and a half now.
Emotionally, I had already managed to undo a lot of the self-censuring or self-negation; imagine me simultaneously doing the 3 wise monkeys to myself, I’d not hear myself, see myself, or voice myself.
Emotional stress and anxiety, which actually caused the injury, that then triggered a physical reaction was what got the recognition of “hey my body reacts to pain” started. That anxiety kicking in made me cold shivers, cry, get stomach cramps, and anxiety sweat. That kind of reaction had been unknown to me for about the most recent 30 years. As a pre-adolescent, I’d typically feel my stomach tying up in knots if I was dealing with something emotional, but as I had learned to self-censor and self-negate, that happened less and less often, until it didn’t anymore.

Back to the recent past, late in 2022. Over the next months, I had an ever-increasing lack of mobility in my shoulder, it was seizing up, and muscles got ever tenser. But the highly probable diagnosis of “frozen shoulder” could not be made, because there was an absence of pain. Now, I can say “an absence of pain recognition or acceptance”, but even only a year ago, it was simply an absence of pain.

So, to get back to that initial question, yes, now, the pain I am experiencing is in line (“normal”, I have come to hate the use of that word, in any and every setting) with what could be expected. I have a difficult and painful injury, and I feel pain that is commensurate with that injury.

I don’t like the pain I am experiencing, but I absolutely love that I am experiencing pain. That self-censuring and self-negating isn’t needed anymore. It’s not gone yet; that’s a process I am working on, unlearning something is harder than learning something.

Nowadays, when for instance, I watch movies, and I gravitate towards dramas where prevalent themes are injustice and in particular the cruelty that usually comes with it, empowerment, and standing one’s ground or drawing that line in the sand; I tear up; and I do so more the more I watch that movie.

And I am learning why those themes trigger me. They’re my themes.

Last week, on a flight to the USA, I saw most of the movie The Help (the flight ended before the movie did), and I teared up at some of the scenes. I re-watched it from the start, and as I anticipated which scene was about to unfold, I felt emotions swelling within me; during more scenes, and more intensely, and longer lasting.
And even now, just writing that, makes those emotions swell.

Yes, the pain I feel is “normal”, and it’s amazing!