The pain doesn't happen so much these days so my life isn't controlled by it in the same way it was a year ago. That's some progress, and I want it to be meaningful, but it will never be enough. Twenty-three and joints a-creaking. It's not a situation conducive to being inspired by incremental improvement.

When I bother to trace the progression, I realize that in fact I am almost in a place I was before Things Began. February 2008 when work turned upside-side, anxiety took control of my body and triggered a new kind of pain that became regular and sometimes debilitating. I had observed with some regularity in the two years prior that my once-sprained knee was prone to swelling and pain in precipitation or after bearing my weight a long day, but it was not a feature of my life - just incidental. Two years ago it overtook me.

But today, I am actually largely back. Sure, the knee is weakened from its injury and causes me problems from time to time. And okay, the other knee sometimes does, too. Well, and my hips. But the frequency is such that it's an occurrence, not a feature any longer. Okay, it's still spontaneous, unexplained, and can still sometimes border on debilitating. Do I sound like I'm not being completely honest with myself? Maybe so. I really just want to be able-bodied, don't I?

The thing is, my body has changed so much in that time. I was never strong before, or athletic, or physically gifted in any way, and sometimes fell terribly behind the pack in the most basic things. I couldn't get my 50m swim times under a minute. I couldn't run without wanting to vomit. I couldn't hit the softball straight and the pitches scared the shit out of me. But god, how I miss that old ability to squat without pain. To touch my toes without grunting. To walk down stairs without fear of falling over. To walk up them without wincing. To want to walk the 0.6 miles on the school run and to get real pleasure from a long bike ride and to feel like I needed to move and stretch just a bit most days in order to feel limber and healthy. To exist within what my own standard of healthy and fit was.

I do believe health is individual and relative. We should not place an expectation of health upon anyone or a moral value upon some arbitrary standard of what is health. Michael Phelps has a different definition of health than my friends who suffer from fibromyalgia and different expectations of what his body can do at its best than do they. And different than I do. But I really do believe I know my body is capable of doing more than I deal with now. I just want to get back to that old self. She wasn't an athlete and most people wouldn't even call her particularly fit. But god dammit, she was able-bodied, and right now I feel like I border on disabled and I'm just not ready for that when I feel like it's fixable.

I have the capacity to get to that place now, because I am not sidelined by my pain on a constant basis. But it's a huge damn hump to jump because it means dealing with discomfort and physical difficulty on a regular basis and FUCK MAN, with all the god damned pain I've had why would I do that to myself, why would I do anything but spoil myself and allow my body to be as comfortable and rested as it can be as often as possible. But nothing comes of that life. Nothing comes of that existence. It's just I don't know if I can make this happen on my own.