A number from one to ten

Elaine Scarry wrote the book on pain. A Harvard professor with a passion for exploring both pain and beauty, Dr. Scarry spent years scouring literary texts in search of some adequate description of the experience of physical pain. In 1985, she declared that pain — as slippery and individual as it is — not only evades language, but actively destroys it. The words available for communicating our pain to one another are tragically insufficient. We hurt. We ache. We suffer. We're uncomfortable. Where in these words is there room for, as Scarry puts it, the felt-fact of being alive?

Here's what strikes me about that: Scarry wasn't writing about chronic pain specifically, but she handed us the exact problem at the center of it. When you can't name a thing, you can't treat it. When you can't treat it, you can't cure it. And when the best medicine can do is shrug at your suffering and hand you a number from one to ten, you start to wonder whether anyone is actually looking for it at all. The language gap isn't just a philosophical inconvenience — it's a clinical one. It shapes what gets researched, what gets validated, and ultimately, what counts as real.

One pain researcher I worked with used the term "change in sensation" to describe the moment when pain levels shift. I liked this — it got at the actual experience of pain, rather than focusing so adamantly on a quantified scale. It was the first clinical language I'd encountered that felt honest about what pain actually is: not a fixed thing to be measured, but a moving one to be tracked.

So what do we do with a problem that resists language? Part of my work at Pain Fermata is helping people articulate aspects of their pain experience that haven't been named yet — and there's something that happens when you finally find the words. The experience gets shape. A path forward becomes visible. And perhaps most importantly, something that has kept you locked inside your own world becomes shareable. Named things can be held by more than one person. That matters.

This is true whether you're someone who lives with persistent pain or someone who hasn't thought much about it in years. Pain is universal enough that most of us, if we reach back, can find a moment when we couldn't quite say what we were feeling — only that it was there, and it was hard, and we were alone with it.