Tell Me How You Really Feel
Double-sided cards with box
Ink and gouache; digitally-rendered repeat print
2.75” x 4.25”
2024
Every time I go to the doctor, I am asked to rate my pain on a scale from one to ten. Sometimes the nurse provides a chart with cartoon faces in various stages of discontent to aid me in this task. Occasionally, the scale will also be color coated: green melting into yellow, then orange, then a poisonous red. And often, I am prompted with a list of words to circle as well. Is my pain throbbing, pulsing, or pounding? Sharp, shooting or stabbing? Aching, sore or dull? Each of these tools is supposed to help my doctor help me, but I often spend so much time trying to parse the degrees of difference between words and numbers that have no objective distinction that I feel I have failed as a patient. I cannot describe my pain adequately. I cannot distill something so fickle into a mark on a form.
This project emerged out of a desire to express a more accurate, more adequate measure of chronic pain; to codify the odd ways I describe sensations to others with problematic bodies who seem to get it without explanation. Those who experience physical torment with regularity know that it is not linear, rarely manifests the same way twice, and often changes just as you think you have a grasp on it. It encompasses so much more than acute discomfort, provoking shifts in the sensory, perceptual, emotional, and psychological.
These cards come in a deck, but they do not have rules. There is no correct order, no right answer, no perfect pairing. I’m sorry, but you cannot win. Pick out the ones - as many as you’d like - that resonate with how you feel in this very moment. It may change by the time you shuffle through the deck. That is ok. Just replace the ones that no longer feel relevant.
Locating an alternate vocabulary for expressing pain will not make it go away, but there is something powerful in the recognition of a communality in how our bodies perceive agony. The experience of pain is both potently individual and unmistakably universal. When I am lying in bed, in the dark, I feel like I am all alone traversing a treacherous landscape. I cannot help but be aware, however, that what I am feeling is by no means unique. Physiological pain is something all people make acquaintance with at some point in their lives, though some get to be more familiar with it than others.
In her 1978 essay, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag examines how culture has abstracted physical suffering through the use of myth and symbolism. When we describe illness in metaphorical terms, she asserts, we sentimentalize the experience of it, and therefore unconsciously tolerate a patient’s suffering.
People confronting illness are forced to adhere to roles, like the ‘warrior’ or ‘survivor,’ for example, that imbue the experience of disease with a certain moral quality. There becomes a right and a wrong way to ‘wage battle.’ Sontag seeks to liberate the patient from the confines of the narratives placed upon them. She argues that the key is to squarely perceive illness as a biological reality.
With these cards, I paradoxically employ metaphor to achieve that end. My hope is that the cards ground you further in the embodied state of pain, and with that, quiet the panic and anxiety that often accompany suffering. When we sit with the reality of our physical confines, we can begin to move toward an understanding that we cannot always control how our bodies feel. The deck consciously avoids common tropes of weaponry, war, and torture, in assent with Sontag’s assertion that when we dictate how a sick person should be, we stigmatize and isolate them.
It is not our fault that we experience pain. We don’t need to try harder or fight more vigorously. We just need to figure out a way to live, one day at a time, with all of the strangeness and grief that it entails.
