When Pain Blocks My Words
I'm trying. But..
It’s difficult to write while trapped in pain. Words feel crippled, as if something inside me is splintered and bent. Every attempt to move forward is strained, like dragging my mind through heavy mud.
And yet, the words still manifest. They press at the edges of my thoughts, restless, crowding in. I can almost see them, spilling across the walls of my mind, darkening every hallway until the light feels far away. But there’s nowhere for them to go. They’re trapped, just like me, in a tiny space without air.
I imagine what it would be like if they were released all at once, a riot of words, thrashing, pushing, and screaming over each other. There would be no order. No rhythm. Just noise.
Jumbled words become meaningless. Without structure, without clarity, they’re nothing more than the rough grunts and broken syllables of early humans. Mere Neanderthal sounds. And how suiting isthat? Pain and fear are primitive. They were here long before poetry or novels or carefully measured sentences. They are the first core feelings. The raw truths that every human, since the very beginning, has known without needing to be taught.
When I’m in pain, it’s not logic that survives. It’s instinct. My mind doesn’t want to analyze or craft, or edit. It wants to curl up, defend itself, survive. In this state, language doesn’t come in clean lines; it comes in jagged bursts in broken pieces.
I want to write. I want to shape what’s inside into something that makes sense. But the pain makes my thoughts slippery, impossible to hold. Every sentence starts, then slides away before I can anchor it.
There’s an odd kind of cruelty in it. Writing can be a release, a way to process what’s unbearable. But when the pain is sharpest, that release becomes harder to reach. It’s like being handed the key to your own escape while your hands are too weak to turn it.
Still, I try. Even if the sentences are crooked. Even if they collapse halfway. Even if I can’t find the perfect words and the paragraphs are more like fragments scattered across the floor. Because sometimes the act of pushing them out, even in their most broken form, is enough.
Pain may strip away polish, but it also strips away pretense. In its rawness, there’s honesty. No hiding. No performance. Just the truth, however messy it comes.
Maybe that’s the gift in writing through pain. It’s not about perfection. It’s about survival. About taking the primitive, guttural sounds of hurt and shaping them, however roughly, into something that says, I am here. I am feeling this. And it matters.
The words don’t have to be beautiful to be real. They just have to make it out of the dark.
Thank you. I'm sorry.