If you find yourself saying over and over, “I’m going to get in shape again”, or “I’m making my comeback”, or “I’m turning the corner”, you might be in a dissociative psychotic loop. Most people say these things maybe twice in their lives. Pain patients say it every 3 weeks. Think of how hard it is to mount that big effort to get back in shape and change your diet. A major “reboot”. It’s a massive effort that takes a massive amount of mental energy. You let all your friends, family, and coworkers know all about it. It takes weeks to psych yourself up. You do all the prep work. Then you give it everything you have.
When you have to do it every 3 weeks however, it’s not so much about the massive amount of energy it takes, it’s more about the fact you are in a dissociative loop and you just haven’t woken up to it yet. In the last year and a half since I had to stop working, I’ve gone through this cycle about 20 times. Each time I’m dumb enough to think, “This is it. I finally found the right formula to get better.” And each time I’m completely wrong. How many times will I dupe myself into thinking this?
I came up with the idea for this post while writing a daily journal entry a few days ago. I noticed that I thought I was improving, but the pain came back and I ended up right back in the same place again. Again. I had my facet joint injections and ended up with a few good days in a row. Again. Then the pain came back, and I went straight into survival mode. Again.
The way I feel a dissociative state is a very cyclical experience. I keep replaying the same thing over and over. I feel like I’m moving forward and making progress, but I always keep getting reset back to first position. Sometimes it lasts several days, but at its worst, it lasts minutes or even seconds. It’s reminiscent of the dissociative state from ketamine. I always keep snapping back to the original place. It’s like when you play an online video game and there is network lag and you keep rubber-banding back into position and never actually make any forward progress, except with chronic pain, it lasts for months or years at a time.
I’m reaching my hand out into the darkness and hoping someone grabs it and pulls me out.
-Del
Chronic pain makes you sedentary. Being sedentary makes you put on weight. I often don’t have an appetite. Pain makes me nauseous, but when I do eat, I often eat garbage food. Garbage food makes you put on weight. I don’t know how many times I’ve put on weight, and lost it, and put it on again, and lost it again. When I was dealing with these same pain issues many years ago, I dropped to 160 pounds. Twice (I’m 6’5″). Then an anti-psychotic medication ballooned me up to 210 within a month.
Usually when I’m feeling better, I start walking and eating better. When I’m feeling extra better, I start up on my exercise bike. 20 minutes the first day at low intensity. Work my way up to 45 minutes. Work my way up to medium intensity. If I work hard, (and I do work hard) I can reach an hour and medium to high intensity after 8 or 9 days. I can get to 10 miles a day of walking in less than 2 weeks. I live in a world of pain. The phrase “No pain, no gain” is laughable to me. I suffer for a living, if you will. If there is an end goal, I can suffer until I reach it, and if it means I reach it faster, then I will suffer more. When I say, “I can fight a 7/10 pain”, this is what I mean. I put in the work, every time. When I have 9/10 pain, I’m already suffering more than I can handle. There is no headroom left for additional suffering. It takes everything I have just to get through the days – hopefully without my mind breaking.
If I didn’t have at least a little bit of a short memory, I would be completely insane. I need to have some sort of hope, and I have to believe someday I’ll get the medical care I need and I’ll be able to actually turn that corner once and for all (or at least until my spine degenerates again in another year or two). Until that happens, this feeling of a dissociative state is always with me. Repeating over and over. I feel like I have good days, but it always pulls me right back in to the void. I can’t snap out of it. I can’t break free. The rubber-banding effect keeps snapping me back into place. I’m trying to break out of this loop. I push and I suffer. Sometimes with purpose, sometimes for survival. I’m reaching my hand out into the darkness and hoping someone grabs it and pulls me out.