“I Tell You What…”

5.3.25

I haven’t known how to begin this… how to explain what has happened to me the last five years as my life has rapidly changed due to an ongoing struggle with my health. Health issues brought on, surprisingly, by very little fault of my own.

It’s raining today, in the fifties, refusing to give into sunshine and rainbows of which I truly need. But it’s weird to explain to people I can’t make an appointment or engagement due to the weather. It’s bananas sounding in 2025. But rain - cold rain, especially - destroys my body.

They’re still not exactly sure what’s happening to my connective tissue or to my body as a whole and frankly, don’t seem to be too interested in finding out. But either way, I have a connective tissue disorder with severe osteoarthritis and spinal stenosis which is rapidly growing and currently aggravating bulging discs in my neck. And there’s all this other shit (ankylosing spondylitis, degenerative disc disease, yada yada) but that is all it is — shit. Names and labels when really it boils down to chronic inflammation. Trauma, assaults, injuries, generational trauma, an accident… it’s all left a mark on what I thought was a rather unremarkable and quiet life.

I wasn’t made to come barreling through this world, but to be gentle and soft. I acquired a pain disorder called fibromyalgia when I was 21 following my first incident with violence. The fibro makes human touch actually hurt sometimes. My poor partner learned quickly I’m a skittish horse, afraid to feel safe.

I still don’t have the words for all of THIS except to say some things have happened to me and my body is crying to not be a coffin for pain. For suffering. My body is actually amazing and strong, healing itself from it’s own bone, absorbed into the spine, another fusion to strengthen me and my quality of life. I just want to walk.

Domestic abuse and a manipulative partner (and Catholic guilt) will convince you that you alone are the fault of your suffering. That you deserve it. And logically you’ll think, ‘I’m Courtney effin Reynolds, here!’ and fight it. But it’s insiduous and creeps in, self doubt growing month by month until you’re paralyzed to share you’re writing with the world, convinced you are shit.

One of them never seems to go away, like a bad rash - the never-ending assault on both my mind and my body. I could hate him, but I don’t. I was able to mother the most magical human and if he is all good, then he is all of the good of his father and me. How could I hate that?

I’m not unusual. We wear our scars in shame when really they are battle wounds, marks of a life full of experience. Full of love and pain, full of excitement and thrills, of doing the right thing when you know it’s the wrong thing. This is to say this isn’t all my fault or their fault or his fault or anyone’s fault. Not truly. It just is. It is. Either way, I’m still here, breathing one more day, fighting the urge to quit and hide and not say any of this. To bury my secrets like my mother and grandmothers buried theirs. But I will not live in shame and neither should you.

Keep dancing, friends…

5.10.25

“the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” - J. Campbell

Pain is a myriad of threads, fleeced together. Memories tied up with scents, with lights, with flashes of images that slowly connect to your story? But what if you don’t know your story? What if the threads are so intertwined into a ball that you can’t make sense of it?

You pause.

You sit still and lay on your back, frozen with pain but persisting to stubbornly understand it. Our society is cruel and Puritanical with how we view pain and suffering. The capitalists and faux Christians teach us that those who suffer must deserve it in some fashion. But the pain I grew up with and absorbed watching my mother and father is deeper, hidden and glossed over. 90’s science teaching us that it’s better living through chemistry