How Chronic Pain Changed My Writing Process

By Heather Sweeney

When I first started writing, I was very particular. I needed either complete silence or music with no lyrics that would jumble the words I was trying to compose. I needed to reacquaint myself with whatever project I was working on because I didn’t like jumping right in where I left off. And most importantly, I needed a long block of uninterrupted time.

Whether I wrote after tucking my young children in bed for the night or parked myself at my desk for hours of marathon writing sessions on the weekends when the kids were with their father, I was always most creative and productive when I could focus solely on my words for a long stretch of time. If I couldn’t write for at least an hour alone, I wouldn’t write at all.

But all of that changed when the headaches started.

I first consulted a doctor about my chronic headaches about five years ago. From there, I hopped from one specialist to another, from one diagnosis to another, from one treatment to another. But the headaches continued to grow in frequency and severity, no one able to understand or fix them.

Living with chronic pain started to affect every aspect of my life, from increasing the amount of breaks I had to take at my work-from-home day job, to decreasing social events, exercise, and time for my personal writing. My invisible illness was not only challenging to explain to family and friends, but it was also forcing me to accept my new limitations.

Christine Miserandino’s widely-shared spoon theory details how people with chronic illnesses have limited units of energy, or spoons, to use per day and therefore have to carefully plan how to allocate each one. As I read more about it, I realized this explanation perfectly described what I went through on a daily basis. I was, as they say, a spoonie.

Early on in my chronic pain journey, I allotted all of my spoons for necessary activities, rarely having any left over for those marathon writing sessions I once loved. My writing was suffering, my publications were few and far between, and my hopes of finishing a book dwindled. That’s when I knew that if I wanted to continue being a writer, I needed to make some major changes in how I wrote.

Because I didn’t have enough daily spoons to dedicate to long stretches of writing time, I decided to take baby steps and see if I had enough for short writing sessions. So I wrote a little while the pasta boiled for dinner. Or while I was waiting for my kids to get ready for school. Or when I had a few minutes to kill before I had to leave for my yoga class. Or any pocket of quiet time that randomly presented itself. And sure enough, my words came back to me.

Then I started to get more adventurous, widening my writing environment to eliminate those other stringent rules I once set for myself: the need to be alone, the need for silence, even the need for a desk. I found myself writing on the couch while my boyfriend watched a show that didn’t interest me. I wrote in the backseat of my car during my daughter’s softball practices. I wrote in crowded bleachers at my son’s track meets. I sometimes even wrote in the waiting rooms of all the doctors I was seeing.

It wasn’t long before I discovered I loved short bursts of writing. If I knew I only had a few minutes, I also knew I couldn’t waste a second, so the words flowed out of me even if I knew they would later be deleted. I learned that even a few minutes of garbage words would get me closer to finishing an essay or a chapter in my memoir.

Short writing sessions also removed the pressure I didn’t realize I was putting on myself to have flawless writing sessions. As a new writer, I had a vision of the perfect environment with a clean desk, a laser focus, no distractions. But life is imperfect and filled with distractions. And once I became a spoonie, I no longer had the luxury of allowing an unrealistic vision to stifle my ability to write.

Thanks to my chronic pain, I’ve become a more flexible writer. I know now that regardless of whether I have one spoon to exert or a whole handful, ten minutes for a writing session or two hours, a clean desk or the Notes app on my phone in the waiting rooms of doctors, I can always find a way to get some words on the page.
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Heather Sweeney writes personal essays and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Insider, Healthline, Five Minutes and elsewhere. She lives in Virginia where she’s working on a memoir about her path to self-discovery after divorce. Subscribe to her Substack Days Like This and learn more about her at https://www.heatherlsweeney.com/.