Mona Lynn Dean
Mona Lynn Dean is a physician and writer based in Berlin. Her work explores the intersections of body, memory, and contemporary life, often drawing on clinical experience to examine themes of illness, perception, and female embodiment. She is an editorial contributor to a Swiss medical-cultural magazine.
Pacing
I’m sitting on a plane at ten thousand meters, chewing through Lufthansa’s dry bread roll, listening to a podcast on ageing. Age as disease; the possibility of intervening in cellular decay; the average citizen soon living to a thousand. Something in me tightens. While others busy themselves with the prospect of their own infinitude; refining it, optimizing it, the way one might outfit a van for an endless journey. I have already passed, more than once, through the valleys of my own finitude.
In my twenties began the odyssey for the right word, the one that might render my symptoms graspable, classifiable, visible. A year, one specialist after another, and always the same look. Meanwhile, my body refused to comply. The bicycle gathered dust in the cellar. My wrists were braced. My knees felt as though someone had stitched them together carelessly. And beneath it all, running through everything, was this wild fear of turning to stone from within – while from the outside, everything appeared as it always had.
Eventually, they came: the decisive twelve letters. An ICD code. Fibromyalgia; a distinction that, in the end, altered nothing. For context: in Germany, an estimated two to four percent of the population are affected, women far more often than men, roughly four to one, which is no coincidence. Fibromyalgia belongs to a long list of conditions that predominantly affect women and whose investigation, relative to their prevalence, remains strikingly underfunded. Illnesses that do not show up in blood work, that leave no inflammatory markers, no visible trace and that are therefore too easily relegated to the domain of the psychosomatic, a category that still functions, in medicine, as a kind of diagnostic placeholder.
What research now suggests is both more complex and more precise: that psychological trauma inscribes itself into the body; not metaphorically, but molecularly. Chronic stress activates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, dysregulates the immune system, increases pro-inflammatory cytokines; the body remains in a state of continuous alert from which it can no longer disengage on its own. And pain memory is not a figure of speech, it is pure neurobiology: pathways worn into the tissue, synaptic patterns repeating themselves because they have learned to do so. This is called central sensitization. At the time, I called it something else: not being understood.
So my twenties were spent contending with a pain memory that had lodged itself in my skull. I had to accept that I could not absorb things the way my peers did. Running, long mountain hikes; these became things that simply did not belong to my life, or if they did, they came at a cost. The same was true of the fog that would settle, unpredictably, into the spaces of my thinking. The fear of not being understood was fed by sentences like, is there ever a day when you don’t have something? – and by the sheer invisibility of the illness itself; by the fact that what cannot be seen is, more often than not, not believed.
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