A recent diagnosis

On radical self care and how pain is normalised for black women

I've been reflecting a lot over the past couple of months on the long lasting effect that stress can have. It’s a pretty terrifying realisation.

After eight years of suffering with chronic pain concentrated in the left side of my jaw, face and head I was recently diagnosed with TMJ. It’s a condition predominantly caused by stress. For some people it's activated by a clenching in the jaw, maybe a grinding, or perhaps tension in the shoulder. It took eight years of misdiagnosis before I discovered that is what I have been dealing with.

Seven years ago I met my partner. During this time I was having headaches that would last for weeks and often months. I was in agony eighty percent of the time while continuing to work, show up, smile and be a functional human being. She said to me that it wasn’t normal to be in constant pain, to exist with these never ending headaches. That was the first time I even questioned whether existing in a constant state of pain was normal.

It’s been a long journey to get to the root cause, to understand, and to start to make sense of it all. Not only my relationship to TMJ, but also black women’s relationship to pain. We are in a society where we are often not believed. We are also often in positions where we are responsible for others, so we feel we have to keep going regardless of what is happening with our bodies. 

Three years ago I made the shift in how I wanted to work and show up in the world. I didn’t think that after I made the shift in how I look after myself, that these symptoms of pain would continue to rear their ugly head.

But I’ve learnt that the body remembers. The body is triggered easily. It goes into protective mode when it senses there is a stressor. When you're someone who has either burnt out chronically or been ill in the past, it's a worry. Even though the stresses that I'm now dealing with feel much more usual and tolerable, it’s a reminder that there was a point at which I worked myself to the point of developing a chronic and unbearably painful condition. 

In the previous iteration of my life, I would sit at a desk trying to ignore the feeling in the left side of my face that was so excruciating. I also have quite a high tolerance for pain, which I absolutely do not wear as a badge of honour. Eventually the tears would begin streaming down my face and I would have to rush to the emergency service. 

For years my pain was misdiagnosed. This is sadly not something which is at all unique to me. Cluster headaches, migraines, many different things. We embarked on various MRI scans and tests to try and figure out what it was. Nothing worked. That was until I tried acupuncture, which I started doing in tandem with dramatically shifting the way I showed up in my life.

This seemed to keep everything at bay. I hadn’t had a flare up for a couple of years - until recently. I was slightly stressed about something work related, and it managed to trigger this bout of incredible pain. I've just come from a massage where I was desperately trying to relieve some of that pain, and I’m booked in for more acupuncture sessions to attempt to reset and recalibrate. 

When the diagnosis of TMJ was finally offered over to me a couple of months ago, I felt ashamed and uncomfortable. I blamed myself for getting into a situation where I was so unwell. I had ended up giving myself a condition that I will now live with for the foreseeable future. It’s a pain response that is now stored and embedded in my very being. 

It's not something I've read about a lot of people curing, so it will be more about managing symptoms. This recent bout has forced me to reflect on my mental state at the time when I would push through, smile and grit my teeth through all the pain. Holding my cheek, unable to find any comfort. Aside from this unsettling reminder of those times, I’m trying my best to move forward now rather than step back. Not reproduce the ways of being or moving through the world that made me sick. 

 It's hard. We live in a world with constant stresses. I feel like I'm continuously having to re-evaluate and shift just to look after my body and limit my stress levels. But it’s worth it. One of the biggest revelations has been that I wasn't kind to myself for a long time. Going forward, I vow to be as kind to myself as possible.

To put health first and foremost. The power of stress is not to be underestimated. But neither is the power of radical self care.