chronic illness & Pain.

have you tried yoga.

“There’s a certain response I have come to expect whenever I share with someone that I suffer from chronic pain. “You should try acupuncture or yoga,” the person will say, often without asking me first if I have actually tried either.” A quote from Laura Kiesel in her Harvard Health article that anyone who suffers from chronic pain or illness will know only too well. There’s the pain and the exhaustion, and then there’s the pain and the exhaustion that comes from the gaslighting - from the medical profession, family, friends, random people on social media and the HR department. If are a BIPOC woman you are even less likely to be believed.

It’s taken me 42 years to get a diagnosis for an underlying condition that I first complained about at the age of 7, when I was told I had ‘growing pains’ as I lay in bed awake for hours after the rest of my family slept.

“Women have been woefully neglected in studies on pain. Most of our understanding of ailments comes from the perspective of men; it is overwhelmingly based on studies of men, carried out by men.”

A recent review by the Institute of Medicine — the medical branch of the National Academy of Sciences — estimated that chronic pain afflicts 116 million Americans, far more than previously believed.