EN 75: "Dealing with pain"
My experience with chronic pain and a lower back pain injury to start the year.
Happy new year!
This year has started with a flare up of a lower back injury from last year. The pain was intense enough to wake me up at night, radiating, burning and forcing me to seek a better posture that didn’t exist. I thought it was recovered, trained relatively light and without pain, but after the workout it appeared again. I need to get serious about the injury, with proper rehabilitation and thought; otherwise it’ll happen again, and I won’t be able to go back to normal training.
The injury made me think about the chronic pain in my neck. It’s been there since I was a kid, with its ups and downs. Some days I won’t notice it unless I pay attention, some days noticing anything but the pain is the real challenge, but it’s almost always there. As I write, I feel it in the centre of my skull, pulsating, biting my neck, blurring my thoughts, attempting to crawl between my eyes. I wonder what it would feel like to get out of bed in the morning and discover that it has gone away.
Overall, there are a few things that impact my pain positively: being active, working out—strength and mobility—and not being too stressed, anxious or sad. I imagine that’s why it hurt way more in my teenage years, and it’s usually manageable nowadays.
Last year, I set the goal to look into my chronic pain and attempt to improve it. The effort continues in 2025, also encouraged by the new injury. These are the books I want to read to understand pain:
A Guide to Better Movement: The Science and Practice of Moving With More Skill and Less Pain
Explain Pain. David Butler and G. Lorimer Moseley.
Painful Yarns: metaphors & stories to help understand the biology of pain. G. Lorimer Moseley.
I’m reading the first one already. One of the key things about pain is that it’s not an input, it’s an output signal. The brain, after gathering and interpreting information about the body and the world, creates pain to protect us from a perceived thread.
Damage to tissues is not required to feel pain, as shown by people that experience pain in phantom limbs and those who have tissue damage but don’t feel pain.
Another interesting bit is that understanding how pain works helps to reduce its symptoms and to manage it better.
Moving and exercising also helps—as long as it’s not painful. The idea is to gradually move more to show the brain that the previously painful movement is not a thread any more, that it’s safe.
Hopefully, if the 2025 goal works, understanding more about pain and exploring movement and mobility will help with my neck pain and with rehabilitating my lower back injury.
As you can see, the newsletter has moved to buttondown.com. In the import process, some past emails have formatting or styling problems and I need to fix them. That’s why there’s currently no archive, although I doubt there were many visits to previous issues anyway.
Why did I make the change to buttondown? It was mostly a gut reaction, ideas brewing in the subconscious mind until they crossed the conscious threshold. If I were to meditate on it, I’m sure there’d be a compelling argument, enough for the next newsletter. For now, these are a few reasons that come to mind:
A distrust of startups and how they can evolve after getting VC money. Specifically thinking about enshittification.
I want to own my data, my thoughts, and be able to import/export it with relative ease. The tedious experience migrating from Authy, who removed the option to export 2FA codes, was enough for one lifetime.
Talking about Authy, while beehiiv does have 2FA, I didn’t find a way to disable it or change it, so I need to keep Authy just for it. Sending a support email would’ve worked, but my patience as a user for bad UX is quite short, and being a developer tends to shorten it even more.(They changed the UX recently, and now you can disable 2FA)
The following quote from Buttondown resonates with me on many levels: “We're a small team of engineers, writers, and designers who are passionate about improving emails, fully remote and have been since our founding in 2017. We're profitable, self-funded, and have no plans to change that.”
Interesting links
Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air (Nancy W. Stauffer). “Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue.”
Rewriting Rust (Joseph Gentle). As a Rust learner, I enjoyed Joseph’s take on Rust and the breaking features he’d add to the language. “I fell in love with Rust at the start. Algebraic types? Memory safety without compromising on performance? A modern package manager? Count me in. But now that I've been programming in rust for 4 years or so, it just feels like it’s never quite there.”