What I've Learned From Traveling With Chronic Pain
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“Savannah is a pretty place to be in pain,” I decided—although my judgment on everything was colored by that last part. While visiting Georgia from London earlier this spring on my way to a media summit in Charleston, I spent my days in Savannah aboard riverboats, in caught-in-time parlors, and walking through leafy city squares. I saw the famous oak trees and how they glow with Spanish moss and light. The movement of the moss in the breeze is slow, melodic, and lulling like wind chimes—but not enough to distract from the burning sensation driving through my spine and shoulders. The pain never really goes away; in my life, every beautiful landscape seems colored by my body’s desire to return home and lie down.
My pain is well traveled. It has visited temples in Shanghai and laid under the stars in the Sahara. It has dressed up for Viennese balls, and writhed in mosh pits across the world. My body and I have different ideas of what constitutes a good time, and used to fight about it. We have grown up together: I inexplicably developed chronic pain at age 12; a hypermobility spectrum disorder seems to be the problem, I recently came to find out at age 30.
Little effort was made to investigate the problem in the years between. But as pain sealed itself into my moment-by-moment experience, I lost my perception that the two had ever been separable. My bed was my haven as a child, a fold where I could vanish from life’s stress. My love for that sanctuary grew stronger as I aged, and needing to lie down on account of my pain was a welcome excuse to dwell there. My body feels agony after hours of sitting or standing. Lying in bed has always helped immensely. We marvel at the notion that we spend a third of our lives asleep in bed; I have spent an inordinate amount of life in mine.
Erasure lost its shine, however, once I reflected on my twenties from their other side. It's painful and exhausting for me to travel, and so I do it less than other travel professionals—but the cost is outweighed by the privilege of meeting the world.
I have an affinity for highway gas stations: The vast, transitory state of the landscape, the road’s vehicular makeup shifting every moment, heatwaves streaming like a body of water all overwhelm me with the joy of pursuit, of velocity. I write a lot about America, and America means road—and being uncomfortable in a car. It took six hours to drive to Atlanta from Savannah in bad traffic. My back felt like a cinder, glowing red inside. But because I arrived an hour later than I had planned, I only had 15 minutes to settle in before I had to be somewhere. This drained to two minutes after steaming my clothes and getting dressed. I lay on my hotel bed for a brief moment; floating, mind and body drifting apart in a familiar bliss. Now I was five minutes late, and the car was waiting. Half of me needed to leave, the other needed to stay. The choice is always bittersweet.
I joined a group of other journalists downstairs for a guided tour of the city, its glass towers, and painted porches. After dinner, I separated from the others to check out a festival of Atlanta’s DIY music scene: bedroom musicians playing noise rock to a small, ballistic crowd. On the luminous grounds of Georgia Institute of Technology, I met people I had only spoken to before on Discord chat servers from my bed; I threw my body into strangers with a kind of faith that inspired fist bumps when the crowd dispersed. Like traveling, moshing confronts me with my physical and psychical helplessness; it also gives me a sense of freedom. I try to find mosh pits wherever I travel, as they are refreshingly shameless. The crowds’ erraticism reminds me that our bodies all carry invisible agony of some form. Who lives, who travels, unscathed?
I wandered off campus and down Georgia Tech’s fraternity row with a new friend, and then on to the nearest Waffle House, the late night institution filled with college kids and yellow light. Then, finally, back to my hotel at 2:30 a.m. The pain was there when I woke up, as it is all mornings, just hotter this time after such an active, long day. After years of searing aches, I no longer feel indignant when I surface in this state: As I matured into acceptance of my reality, another pain, maybe a more heartfelt one, finally abated. Now, there is more room in my body—and alongside pain, I hold Turkish coffee and mountain breezes, the azure Red Sea, a Paris gray with snow. There is my burning spine, and there is August in Seville.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
