Pain

Right now, I’m sitting on my bed with a pillow and blanket pressed down onto my ankle. On top of this mound of bed accessories sits the laptop on which I’m typing. As I type, the bed covers are pressed down into my ankle with the force of Thor himself because it’s the only thing that’ll stop the radiating pain that is so very hard to describe.

Imagine if you took a sprinkle of knife-driving-into-foot and added a dash of throbbing agony, mixed with a tiny splash of a burning sensation. You’d get what I’m experiencing now.

That all sounds bad, I know. But as depressing as it sounds, it’s something that I’m used to. It’s been a while since I’ve had this pain — I want to say about… two or three months? I’m not sure, there’s no calendar counting down the days until I’m next in agony.

If only there were, then I could plan a little bit better.

But alas, I find that doing anything, literally anything, is better than any painkiller when it comes to taking my mind off what’s going on in the old foot. Hence why I’m typing this.

I consider myself to be quite Stoic, so when you’re faced with pain, all the time spent studying Stoicism really does come in handy.

Epictetus teaches us that there’s only one thing we can truly control, and that’s our mind. We can’t control how other people treat us. We can’t control what happens to us. Hell, we’re not even truly in control of our bodies. At any minute, Epictetus tells us, your body can be struck with ailment or incapacitation.