My pain is invisible 

Antonia Friemelt

Antonia Friemelt was born in Lower Saxony, Germany in 1986. She studied Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen, Material Culture: Textiles at the University of Oldenburg, and Applied Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Since then, she has worked as a freelance journalist and copywriter for various magazines, online platforms, and clients. She also served as editor-in-chief of NOOZ Magazine and has worked in corporate communications. She most enjoys writing about things that inspire her, move her, or are otherwise overlooked. The theme of the human condition fascinates her not only on a literary level, which is why she is also pursuing further training in somatic bodywork. After living in Australia, Bremen, the U.S., Munich, Berlin, and Potsdam, she currently resides in Leipzig. She is currently working on a novel and a short story project. Her literary publications can be found in ArtLit Potsdam, among other places.

My pain is invisible 

My pain is invisible, because my illness is. Or rather, illnesses—because there are several that merge into one another; intertwine; flow into one another and blend, forming a web that envelops me and my existence. 

And sometimes I feel that way too: invisible. 

My pain is invisible because it does not relate to physically visible conditions, but to invisible ones. And the mental and emotional states are invisible too, just like the effort required to hide them over and over again, or, on the contrary, to have to explain them. 

My pain has many symptoms and, for a very long time, no diagnoses—and then suddenly many, and they keep changing, depending on who you ask and who diagnoses it. 

My pain sits in my bleeding lower abdomen, and in my bleeding uterus, and in my exhausted body and my exhausted yet frantic mind. 

My pain sits in an exhaustion that is unimaginable to many, and that does not improve; no matter what one does or does not do. 

My pain sits in a brain that functions differently from other brains and constantly perceives too much and never finds rest. Or it comes to rest, which is a euphemism, because this rest is a crash that sometimes lasts for hours or days, and during which nothing works anymore. Not moving, not thinking, not speaking, not reading, not listening, just lying there. In a darkened, quiet room without stimuli. 

My pain lies in a state where very often everything is too much and at the same time much is too little. 

My pain consists of the deviation from the norm; from the meritocracy; from society itself and lies in loneliness; in isolation; in being different. 

My pain, which consists of countless invisible battles that I must fight daily with myself and with life, and which no one sees, and in which I very often lose, but sometimes also win. 

Then, for a brief moment, I am one of you: one of the healthy; the normal; the functioning; those participating in everyday life, even if only for an instant.