The Pain of Things Getting Better

AKA my tearful breakdown last week, unfamiliar pain, post-surgery thoughts, and why things often feel worse before they feel better.

Last week, I had emergency surgery (an appendectomy), and it’s left me with so many reflections on health, food, bodies, and…how we get through hard things. The surgery itself isn’t really the point, but like so many experiences, it kicked up some dust in my brain and tugged at old neural pathways.

The second morning after surgery, I cried to Jeb. And let me be clear: it was not the quiet, cinematic kind of crying—this was the messy kind. Tearful hiccups and squinty, watery eyes. The kind where your body seems genuinely confused about how it’s supposed to process what it’s feeling. I told him, through all of it, that this pain was worse than the pain I was in before surgery.

My husband—obviously concerned, yet still steady and strengthened by years of sobriety—didn’t rush to fix it. He didn’t minimize it. He just said, slowly:

“Okay. But now we know what the problem was. And yes, this is pain—but it’s the pain of things getting better.” ¹

It was one of those moments where someone hands you your own words back, rearranged just enough that they shake something loose. Because (wouldn’t you know it?!) this is literally something I tell my clients all the time.

This is kind of what ‘healing pain’ has felt like to me before? Like every part of me is begrudgingly putting its hand in the middle and agreeing to trudge onward. Knowing it’s right. Knowing it has to be done. And, still, knowing it isn’t always going to be fun. [Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash]

Sometimes—actually, most of the time—healing hurts more than staying. And not because staying is easier, or kinder, or safer in any real sense. I’ve found that staying hurts less at first because it’s familiar. Known pain has a strange way of making itself feel manageable, predictable, and therefore perhaps livable. We learn where it lives in our body. We build routines around it. We tell ourselves, I’m fine. I can survive this. I already am.

Healing pain doesn’t offer that comfort.

Healing pain is unfamiliar. It asks new things of us as it disrupts the coping strategies that once kept us afloat. It also has the audacity to show up without a script, without proof that it will pass—only a quiet (if you listen hard enough) promise that staying the same will cost more in the long run.

This is true whether we’re talking about recovery from surgery, from an eating disorder, from substances, from a relationship that shrinks us, or from the willful ignorance someone may cling to when the world feels too heavy to face. Staying pain calcifies because it deepens grooves. It narrows our lives slowly enough that we don’t always notice until we’re cramped inside them.

Healing pain—even though it’s sharp and disorienting—has movement. It changes and loosens over time. And, most importantly, it brings us closer to our bodies, to our values, to the parts of ourselves we had to abandon to stay afloat.

That doesn’t mean we need to romanticize it. Pain is pain. There’s absolutely no prize for enduring more of it. But there is meaning in recognizing what kind of pain we’re in.

Some pain is a signal that something is wrong and staying will make it worse. Some pain is the sound of scar tissue forming, of nerves waking up, of systems recalibrating after long neglect.

Our dog, Grey, last year after being bit by a rattlesnake. I have never felt more seen by a photo. Precisely how I’m feeling 😅 Living in a metaphorical cone.

On that second morning, I didn’t need silver linings or lessons. Frankly, I just needed to cry (I don’t do it enough!!!). But I also needed someone to sit with me and name the truth plainly: this hurts because something is finally changing.

And maybe that’s the gentlest reframe we can offer ourselves when healing feels unbearable—not this shouldn’t hurt, but this hurts because I’m moving toward myself.

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Shortly before hitting “post” on this piece, I read my friend Savala Nolan’s reflection on hope. (read it here, it’s wonderful). I wanted to add a note about it here, because it feels so resonant. Savala wrote about how hope often falters, but the work—the care, the tending, the showing up—is still sacred and necessary. Healing, too, asks us to move forward without guarantees. The pain is unfamiliar, the path uncertain, and relief is not immediate.

Yet just as we continue the work of repairing the world because it calls us, we continue the work of healing ourselves because it calls us. And I think right now, when the news fills us up with rage and we wonder if all this pain will ever get better, this is what we need to remember: Sometimes the value isn’t in ease, or certainty, or hope—it’s in the simple, stubborn act of tending to the truth, to what matters, moment by moment.

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I don’t know if anything I’ve written about here will make sense. Maybe I’m still in a post-op daze (I definitely am). But I just want to say: If you’re out there right now, aching in a way that feels unfamiliar and unfair, I want you to know you’re not weak for wanting the old pain back. You’re human. And you’re allowed to grieve what was survivable, even as you choose what’s healing.

Both can be true. And often, they are.

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• Have you found this to be true? That at first, healing something—or from something—feels worse before it feels better?

• Are you going through anything right now where the pain is unfamiliar, even if you know it’s the right thing, deep down?

Looking for something else?

Here are some posts and podcasts you may have missed…

The Impact of Chronic Stress on Digestion, Psychological Restriction in Autoimmune Disease, and Feeling Safe with Food Again with Meg Bowman

The Weight We Inherit: Dieting and Disordered Eating as Intergenerational Trauma with Therapists Ashley Wilfore and Sarah Louer

A Quote, a Pill Box, and a Bowl of Food

Letters to the Editor: Can Ultra-Processed Foods Be Both Protective and Problematic?

Eating When the World is on Fire

1. This is also the man who, hours later, was complaining about what appears to be a scratch on his hand. The skin equivalent of a Man Cold? And we laughed (well, I tried not to, because ouch that hurts after abdominal surgery) at how hard his life is right now and how painful that terrible scratch must be. I couldn’t paint him as too much of a saint in this newsletter 😅