On comparing yourself to the person you used to be
Ever compare yourself to the person you used to be?
I don’t have to imagine him. He hangs on my wall.
A wall full of medals and certificates, framed and dated, every one of them saying the same thing: this man was competent at his job. The Air Force is thorough about documentation. If you did it well, there’s paper to prove it.
I walk past that wall every day. The man in those frames never walks past me. He just watches, permanently mid-career, permanently capable.
But now?
Thirty-seven years ago, chronic pain moved into my body and started rearranging the furniture. It didn’t take everything at once. That’s not how it works. It works like a slow tide. You don’t notice the water rising until you look down and realize you’re standing somewhere you never chose to stand.
The Air Force taught me that capability was identity. You are what you can do, how fast you can do it, and how much you can carry while doing it.
When pain grounded me, I didn’t just lose a career. I lost my answer to the question, “Who are you?”
It took me years to learn that the question has more than one answer.
The list keeps changing
Diminished capability isn’t a single loss. It’s a subscription to loss. It renews without asking.
Some days I can walk the block. Some days the mailbox is a marathon. The hardest part isn’t the bad days. The hardest part is that the line between good and bad days keeps moving, so I can never quite memorize where it is.
You can’t build a life on a foundation that shifts. So you learn to build differently. Lighter. Modular. A tent instead of a house. Something you can pitch wherever today’s ground happens to be.
Grief without a funeral
Nobody sends flowers when you lose the ability to kneel in a garden. There’s no memorial service for the man who could drive across three states without stopping, or stand through an entire ceremony, or carry his own luggage through an airport.
That man is gone. And because there was no funeral, people assume there was no death. They expect you to be done grieving something they never saw you lose.
You’re not done. You grieve in installments, a little more each time the list gets shorter.
A shorter list is still a list.
That sentence took me a long time to believe. I offer it to you at a discount: believe it now, and save yourself the years.
The man on the wall always wins
For too long, I measured every day against the man in those frames. It’s a rigged contest. He never flares. He never cancels. He never lies awake at two in the morning negotiating with his own spine. He doesn’t have to pace himself, because he’s made of paper and glass.
The only fair comparison is yesterday’s me against today’s me, and even that one needs a generous referee. Some days, getting dressed is the victory lap. On those days, I’ve learned to take the lap anyway.
A preview of coming attractions
Here’s something I’ve come to believe: living with chronic pain is like being handed a preview of your own old age, decades early.
The stiffness, the pacing, the canceled plans, the careful math before every staircase. Most people meet these things at eighty. I met them in my forties, without the gray hair that’s supposed to warn everyone it’s coming, and without the decades of practice that are supposed to soften the landing.
Arriving early to old age is a strange kind of trip. Nobody else in the room is your age. The brochure lied about the amenities.
But there’s another side to arriving early, and it took me years to see it: I’ve had a long head start on the curriculum. Pacing. Asking for help. Letting go of tasks without letting go of worth. My peers are just now enrolling in courses I’ve been studying for decades. When friends my age start losing capabilities and call it a crisis, I recognize it as a chapter. I know the terrain, because I’ve been living in it since before it was fashionable.
Pain made me a scout, sent ahead of my generation. What I send back are field reports.
A new unit of measure
I used to measure my days by what I produced. Now I measure them by what I chose.
Living with diminished capability means living on a fixed energy income. Every task has a price, and overdrafts charge interest, paid in pain, usually with a due date of two in the morning. Pacing isn’t weakness. Pacing is budgeting. Nobody calls a family thrifty with money foolish.
Why do we call a body thrifty with energy lazy?
And asking for help, the thing I resisted longest, turned out not to be surrender. The military should have taught me this part too: no mission runs without support. Marianne isn’t a sign that I’ve failed. She’s my logistics chain. Every operation worth running has one.
What grew in the cleared ground
Here is the part nobody tells you, because it sounds like a greeting card until you’ve lived it: when some capabilities go, others get room to grow.
I’ve facilitated a peer support group in Los Angeles for twenty-seven years. Every Tuesday, I sit in a chair and do something I was never trained to do in uniform: I listen. Not to fix. Not to command. Just to witness.
I could not sit in that chair if I hadn’t lost what I lost. The losses are the credential. Nobody in that room needs advice from the man on my wall. They need the man in the chair.
I am not less than I was. I am other than I was.
The distinction matters. “Less” is a verdict. “Other” is a direction.
The wall stays
The medals and certificates are still up. I haven’t taken them down, and I don’t intend to.
Someday my great-nephew will stand in front of that wall and ask what they’re all for. I’ll tell him the truth: they’re for the first half.
Then I’ll tell him about the second half. The half with no medals, no certificates, no paper trail at all. The half where competence stopped meaning what I could carry and started meaning what I could carry someone else through.
The wall documents the man I was.
It just doesn’t get a vote on the man I am.
Tom Norris
Chronic pain advocate, Los Angeles
chronicpainla.com
The views, positions, and recommendations expressed in this article are based on my personal experiences and independent research. They are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the American Chronic Pain Association (ACPA). AI was used for research, editing, and organizing; final text is my own.