Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System Quotes

“I want to be better than my pain, but I cannot will my way through it. I have willed my way through so much pain in my life, and now I have come up against pain that is bigger than my will.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Empathy is an act of the imagination that grows from a gut-twinge of sympathy, a notion that I would not like to feel what that poor other person is feeling. We override our own flinching instinct to ask what another person's suffering might feel like.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Our fix-it-itis is not a simple social gaffe but the evidence of a deep blind spot born with the help of the market. We are educated about illness by television commercials... A puzzle like me that cannot be solved is a point of discomfort, a disjuncture, a black hole... My body is a discomfort, a burr in the hide of the marketplace itself, a reminder that not all pain can be treated with a purchase.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Chronic pain is not a missing limb or open wound; it is the essence of invisible suffering... I wish I sparkled. I wish my pain made me beautiful, made me more noble, or was a fashion statement. Instead it is just pain, wordless and desperate for expression.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“I do not try to look sexy or cute. Pain pushes even gender out of the way, even vanity, even the hopes of looking like someone else. In some ways, pain returns me to childhood, my eyes to the naked, peaceful orbs of animals.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Desire and love have to grapple first with reconstituting themselves in a body that has been altered to its core.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“The body in pain is a deviant body that defies expectations, refuses the easy boxes of sick and well.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“The aversion to pain is as deep as the first nerve cell in the oldest organism. We would like to contain pain as a personal problem, a health-care issue for folders and privacy and sighing and "Get well soon." But if pain were not political, we wouldn't have torture and jails, both of which manipulate and use the body's instinctive aversion to pain to instill fear and compliance. We need to talk about the patterns of pain.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Pain enacts itself in predictable ways and flows into the fault lines between all the other social problems once can imagine, mortaring the pieces in place. Those who are in chronic pain - again, mostly women - are viewed as unreliable, as an unwise investment, as a burden, as complainers, as unfixable. There are so many of us, women who are supposed to be caretakers, whose bodies have reversed the flow of care and said no, women who bodies demand alternate systems of caretaking and new methods of healing. We also need new ways of seeing and naming pain.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“People without pain think there are pills for everything, but I have not found a pill that erases pain.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“I didn’t know all the rules of pain yet, the rules of doctors and power and the military decorum and submission, but I would learn.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“I have tried and I enjoy yoga. But if you tell me to try yoga, then I will have to fight you. You will win, but I might nip at your jugular with my sharp incisors first.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“It's not that I am afraid to hurt myself but that I am entrusted with taking care of this system in which my soul hangs.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“I should just ignore foodies as i ignore football, because both cultures have nothing to do with me - but the culture of saffron and creme fraiche gets under my skin. The competitiveness makes me feel insecure, and this weakness is the insecurity of a woman who can't quite believe that domestic goddessery is really not expected of her. (Right?)”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“I would make statues of the sick and dying, not to sob at the waste of sickness or death but at its normalcy, at the way the fluids flow out from these temporary containers. Illness is not a departure from the itinerary, not a battle, not a failure. It is the noble permanent out-breath, the quotation mark to close out the sentence.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System