Love Letters to Pain: A Poetic Autoethnography

This performative intervention is a poetic provocation that explores and embraces the rich complexities of chronic pain experience. Through a series of poems written from and about my lived experience of chronic pain, this intervention explores pain as an intimate collaborator, and shares insights and lessons from living in a chronic pain body.

I have lived with chronic back and neurological pain for over 20 years and have, until recently, related to my pain as a barrier and hindrance to my work and life. For the past five years I have been turning towards my pain differently, exploring through my dance practice and wider research what it means to creatively collaborate with pain. I have carried out practice-led research with other leading disabled dance artists with chronic pain: Raquel Meseguer, Laura Fisher, Amy Rosa. We explored practices that work with, rather than despite or against, our chronic pain, and developed choreographic tasks that ‘enable the expression, qualities and skills of chronic pain bodies’ (Hopfinger 2021, 123). I further explored and developed these practices in a new diversely accessible body of work, Pain and I, which includes a live performance, audio piece, and digital graphic score. Part choreography and part love letter to pain, this solo work embraces the spectrum of chronic pain experience: the difficulties, hardships, vulnerability, lessons, insights, strength, even joy. Pain and I is an intimate autobiographical work that invites audiences to reflect on what it means to care for ourselves, our bodies, and each other in times of personal and collective pain.

The poetic autoethnography I share for this performance intervention takes the writing approach I developed when creating Pain and I, in a new direction. Love Letters to Pain is a performative sharing of poems that chronicle a pain flare up I experienced between October and December 2022. I wrote the poems from inside the pain flare – in the very moments and modes of experience. This chronological collection of poetic autoethnographic writings is a documentation of the process I often go on with a pain flare; a process of breaking up with, and reconnection or falling back in love with, my body. The act of writing and editing these poems is not only an act of documentation, but also a creative practice that enables me to open more fully to the insights, lessons and knowledge of pain experience. Through writing and developing these poems, I have noticed recurring themes: care, tenderness, fragility, damage, loss, grief, honesty, generosity, boldness, risk, ferocity, pleasure, love. I also noticed recurrent ideas: disruption to routine and structure; critiques of capitalist concepts of productivity and success; reconfiguration of time (cripping time); and pain as a portal into other ways of being. These themes and ideas speak less of a concrete linear process and more of an ontological and epistemological sensibility – an openness and curiosity towards shaking up the norm, re-making value systems, living differently, experimenting.

My autoethnographic approach resonates with other disabled scholars who acknowledge the embodied nature of knowledge production by writing their own bodies into their research (Birk 2013). I present chronic pain experience, and poetic-critical reflection on that experience, as a site of knowledge-making.