The Content of Pain: When Illness Writes the Story for You
Not all creative work made during illness is seeking resolution. Sometimes it is seeking only to mark the moment, to capture what it feels like to be in the middle of something unnameable.
I didn’t set out to write about pain and ill mental health. In fact, for much of my early creative life, I worked quite deliberately to write around it, past it, sometimes even against it. I believed, perhaps, that if I just stayed busy enough with other ideas, other people’s stories, or even softer versions of my own, then I might not have to acknowledge the more difficult truths lodged somewhere in my ribcage or knotted deep in the back of my mind. I gave my characters other wounds, ones easier to name. I chose color when I felt grey (until I couldn’t anymore). I turned to essays about beauty, creativity, and connection, hoping that by focusing outward I could avoid the inward collapse that was always just barely held at bay.
But it turns out that pain, especially the kind that roots itself in the body or lingers in the nervous system long after the triggering event has passed, has a persistence and a precision that doesn’t always respect your narrative preferences. Whether I wanted it to or not, my work began to circle certain themes and emotional landscapes again and again, looping back like a compass needle that knew better than I did where true north actually was. Eventually, I had to concede what I already suspected deep down, which was that illness was not just part of the background material or a metaphorical thread within the tapestry. It had become the content itself. This didn’t happen because I made some bold, declarative decision to write about it, but because it had quietly and inevitably shaped what I was able to see, what I was drawn to explore, and what I could no longer ignore.
The Uninvited Author
There are many ways that illness, whether chronic, acute, physical, or psychological, shows up in the stories we tell, the images we create, and the emotional tone we bring to our work. Sometimes it is overt and fully named, the centerpiece around which everything else is arranged. Other times, it appears obliquely or symbolically, casting its shadow across our choices in structure, color, pacing, or language. For some, illness inserts itself as a kind of repetition, a compulsion to return to the same themes or questions even when we believe we’ve already moved on. For others, it shows up as silence, an erasure of things too raw or too vulnerable to be spoken out loud. What connects all of these expressions is the sense that the body, especially a body in pain, can become a kind of narrator in its own right, telling stories with or without our conscious permission.
In my own case, and especially in the years when depression loomed large and often, I came to understand that creativity was not a way out of illness, but rather a way through it. In writing Crochet Saved My Life, I documented how the rhythmic, tactile act of crafting helped stabilize my mental state during some of the most disoriented periods of my life. What I didn’t fully grasp at the time, but see more clearly now, is that the work I created during those years was not simply therapeutic. It wasn’t just helping me feel better. It was forming the actual substance of my voice as a writer. The content of my creative output was a direct reflection of the internal landscape I was navigating. It was fragmented, sensitive, sometimes subdued, but often filled with subtle attempts at coherence. There are things I would do differently if I wrote that book now but it was the book I needed to write at the time.
Illness as Material, Not Metaphor
Of course, I’m not alone in this. You can see this pattern reflected in the work of so many artists and writers who create from within states of altered wellness, especially those who come from communities that have historically been forced to navigate both illness and exclusion at once.
Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals, for instance, don’t merely chronicle the experience of illness as an isolated event. They locate it within a matrix of silences, structural violence, and resistance. Her body is both personal and political, and the content of her work becomes a site of radical honesty, not in spite of her illness, but because of it.
Similarly, the writing and performance work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha unapologetically centers disabled and chronically ill bodies. This work rejects the notion that pain must be turned into metaphor or transcended in order to have value. Instead, it becomes part of a living archive, a testimony not just to suffering but to survival and care.
Not Just Therapy
It is important to distinguish this from the oversimplified narrative that art is always healing, or that creativity is a form of therapy in and of itself. While it is true that many of us experience a kind of release or grounding through making, the idea that our work must redeem our pain or offer a tidy sense of catharsis is both creatively limiting and emotionally dishonest.
There is a difference between using art as a process to metabolize emotion and shaping content that attempts to contain or explain illness to others. Not all creative work made during illness is seeking resolution. Sometimes it is seeking only to mark the moment, to capture what it feels like to be in the middle of something unnameable.
In transpersonal psychology, which views altered states of consciousness, including those states induced by illness, crisis, or spiritual emergency, as valid parts of human development, there is room for these unresolved expressions. The question is not whether the pain is productive, but whether it is being witnessed, integrated, or allowed to speak.
The Truth Behind the Page
When I look back at the work I created during the hardest parts of my mental health journey, I often find things I didn’t know I was saying. There are recurring images that make more sense in hindsight. There are shifts in tone that coincide almost perfectly with the rhythms of my depressive episodes. There are whole essays that feel like they were written by a version of me that was trying very hard to maintain control, while another, quieter self was just beneath the surface, whispering the truth. This kind of dual authorship - conscious and unconscious, well and unwell - is something I’ve come to see as not just inevitable, but instructive.
Creative content shaped by illness often challenges mainstream expectations of narrative form. It may not follow a traditional arc, may resist climax and closure, may linger too long in discomfort or uncertainty. For many artists, especially those living with long-term disability or fluctuating energy, the work itself may be sporadic, nonlinear, or fragmented. This does not happen because we lack discipline. It happens because this is how our lives unfold. Feminist and disability-informed frameworks remind us that this isn’t a failing. It’s a truth of embodiment, and honoring that truth in our content is itself a radical act.
Making Peace with the Unresolved
There is also, I believe, a particular kind of honesty that becomes possible when we stop trying to write around our discomfort and instead let it shape what we’re creating. I don’t mean we have to tell everything or that we owe anyone our story in its rawest form. But I do mean that when we allow our content to be informed by the actual realities of our lives, including the parts that feel inconvenient, ugly, or unmarketable, we often find a depth of connection and resonance that we can’t reach by other means. This kind of honesty may not be easily packaged. It may not go viral. But it matters. And for some readers or viewers or listeners, it becomes a lifeline.
So much of the work I admire most has emerged from this place of layered, embodied truth. These are not stories that perform resilience for an audience. They are stories that allow complexity to remain intact. They are often uncomfortable. They are often slow. And they are often the most generous, because they tell the truth about what it costs to survive and create at the same time.
Let the Work Be What It Is
If you are someone who is writing or making from within the experience of illness, know that your work does not need to be inspirational. It does not need to resolve into a lesson. It does not need to fit a mold. What it needs, more than anything, is your willingness to let it be what it already is: the content of pain, and the content of truth. Let it be whatever it needs to be right now.
If you read this far, perhaps you like my work. It does take work. Support it if you can.
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Thank you
, , and for always inspiring.