Gratitude is not required in your journey with chronic pain.

Sure, folks will foist it upon you.

Tell you your pain is a gift.

And it might be.

But the truth, as with most things, is that you get to decide.

And often it’s not as simple as a gift with no sharp edges.

Perhaps it’s easier for someone else to declare your experience a gift when it isn’t theirs to hold.

Your gratitude is welcome. Same as everything other feeling (and there can be so many).

But it’s not required, even if you’re repeatedly told otherwise.

There can be glimmers of gifts and beams of gratitude and even the occasional appreciation for a lesson, but folks often paste these bright spots over the intensity and immensity of the pain you might experience.

Today, I’m here to say that wherever you are in your experience is okay.

You need not fastforward or find the silver lining in the storm cloud that threatens a flare.

Sometimes we just sit on our front porch as the clouds hang low, limbs restless and heart thudding deep, and whatever we feel is not a thing to usher in or push away, it’s just a thing that’s there and true because our bones sing of it. Maybe it’s a cloud, and it might float on or stick around. We might not know yet. And whatever we see in it or make of it is ours, a thing that can’t be lassoed by someone else’s hollow words because they’re not the ones on the porch in the weather, eyes toward the storm.

Sending care though the clouds,

Jess