Francesca Grossman Tells Us

About Pain and Its Consequences

Hello friends,

This is the first of a series I’ll be sending out occasionally to all subscribers in which I invite an author to tell us five things—not only about their most recent book, but about their life too. I got the idea to do this series because I love to champion writers and I never tire of reading about the stories behind the stories, essays, poems, plays, movies, and shows we read, watch, and listen to.

Francesca Grossman agreed to kick off the series to tell us about self-worth, poison oak, the beauty of small moments, and her most recent book, Not Weakness: Navigating the Culture of Chronic Pain. I first met Francesca many years ago when she enrolled in my Writers Camp at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. She struck me immediately as generous, smart, and deeply compassionate. When you read her beautiful answers to my questions I think you’ll see how correct that first impression was.

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Tell us about a time when you took advice that turned out to be really good or really bad.

When I was ten, I had a group of friends from school who did not like me very much. In the way we try to please those less eager to accept us, I spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to change their minds. I would follow them from the bus stop, tumble into their mudrooms, and listen to their sighs when I settled down on the couch next to them to watch Three’s Company. Maybe they just thought I was annoying. I was. But a few things lead me to believe the reason they were so cruel was that I was fat . . . or fatter than them. 

My grandmother, a woman I had idolized since I was a toddler, would sometimes be around after school, witnessing this. 

"Don't chase people, dear. I promise you they aren't worth it."

"You don't know them! They are my friends, they just like to be funny with me," was my answer, of course.

My grandmother lit her Marlboro red, sucking in, blowing a thin waft of smoke off to the right, over her shoulder. "There is nothing to be gained by letting people walk all over you," she said. "When they walk over you, you can't help but think you're worth walking on. I don't really care what those little girls think about you. I care what you think about yourself, and right now, I worry you do not think enough." 

I rolled my eyes, thinking my grandmother worried too much, she couldn't possibly understand.  

One afternoon after the mudroom, the girls piled into the kitchen to get a snack. One of the leaders wanted to cook bacon, and the others were delighted. Bacon was never my favorite food, but as I usually did, I stayed quiet. There were only so many chairs at the kitchen table. When I went to sit in one, one of the girls pointed to the floor. 

“You can sit there,” she said. 

Remember, all I wanted was for them to like me, so when they told me to do something, I did it. When the bacon was done, one of the girls tossed it on a paper towel-lined plate and brought the plate to the table. I could see danger in the curl of her smirk. 

“Frannie, you want some?” she asked. I didn’t. I shrugged. 

And that was when they started snorting. Loud throaty snorts, which could only mean one thing. 

“Come on, piggy,” they chanted. “Eat that bacon.” They laughed through the chants and snorts so that their faces were red, their eyes crying. 

I’ll never know if they were calling me a pig and shoving bacon in my face in a really meta way, or if they just forgot pigs are bacon, but I didn’t care. The shame of this moment has never left me, because, I’m so embarrassed to admit, I ate the bacon. And worse, I didn’t stand up indignant and march out of the kitchen, the mudroom, the house and their friend group. I came right back the next day. 

It took me a very long time to believe I was worth more than that. I don't know if following my grandmother's advice would have changed that - maybe a little. I was just a kid who tried too hard who had mean friends. But I have to think that if I had really heard her, and heeded her advice, I wouldn't have come back the next day. Or the many after that. 

Tell us about a personal transformation in your life or a change that you’ve made for the better.

I used to have an intense drive to succeed. I was a busy person. I liked to zip around, schedule just enough meetings and events during the day that the hours were filled. I had all kinds of things I was hoping to accomplish in my life -  goals and dreams for school, career, family, and otherwise. I always thought about the big moments in life as being the reward for my hard work - the graduation, the publication, the ceremony, the prize. I buzzed through my life as much as possible, aiming at those big moments, pretty much ignoring all of the steps I took along the way.

Then I got sick, and I kind of never got better, and it morphed into chronic pain and made my life much slower and much smaller.  Going for a short walk became a triumph, spending the day pulling weeds in the garden was success. Working even for a couple of hours in the morning without having to lie down was an accomplishment. At first, this felt like a failure. I spent a lot of years around that time feeling inadequate and useless now that I had no energy to push myself to go after big things. But over time, my feelings about this have morphed. My life of small moments and small things has proven to me that my day can be mostly about paying attention. Sure, there are things to do, and when I can, I do them. But more, my day to day is about putting one foot in front of the other, and being able to accept that which mother nature hands out, both the good and the bad. Once I settled into that acceptance, I made a pretty significant pivot and my life got much better.

Right now I am watching the maple leaves blow in the late spring wind. I’m close enough to the tree that I can see the ants scurry all over the bark. I’m waiting for my son to finish baseball and I didn't finish my water bottle because I know he will want the last three sips. I did not cram an errand into this half hour. I didn't make a phone call. Instead, I am writing this while watching 500 ants do their thing. 

Francesca at ages 10 and 20.

Tell us about a regret you have or a mistake you’ve made.

Oh my, there are so many to choose from. But here's one I still think about. 

I am not a runner. I have run maybe four times in my life by choice and I think I only did it to prove that I could. (P.S. I couldn’t). 

I went to college in Northern California. The outdoors is stupendous there -  the cool breezes, sunny skies, thick green succulents, citrus trees perfuming the air. People in Northern California love being outside, exercising, playing, being in the awe inspiring nature. This is in stark contrast to my childhood home outside of Boston, where people tend to like the inside of pubs and hockey rinks. When I fist moved to California, I learned that people there loved to hike (which I learned is just walking on hills with boots on) and to run (which, again, I never do). My newest friend at the time was one of these outdoorsy hiker-runners. She regaled me with stories of her transcendent morning runs in the foothills. She implored me to try it.  She went so far as to say "come on, you only regret the things you do not do," which I'll admit, I took as a challenge.

I wore only a sports bra and shorts. It was impossibly hot at the top of the treeless hills. I was sweating so much that my Discman  (it was 1996) kept sliding from my shorts. I stopped, grateful for the reprieve, and looked around for something to sop up my sweat. I tore off a bunch of leaves from a plant on the side of the path, wiped my whole stomach, armpits and thighs, amazed at how well it worked. I kept running, feeling triumphant and somehow, a little bit smug.

As soon as I got back to the dorm, a deep, relentless itch began, blooming from my trunk and covering almost all of my body and face. Turns out there is poison oak everywhere in the hills in Northern California, and even if you don't rub it all over your body you can get sometimes even it from the air. Of course I did rub it all over my body, so this was clearly my mistake. It took me two weeks and about a gallon of anti-itch cream and pill after pill of Benadryl to finally get rid of the rash. When I look back on it now, a freshman in a new school, red and swollen and scratching in her intro to civics class, I can laugh about it, but at the time I was mortified - and I never went into those foothills again. Months later, someone actually said to me "wow I didn’t recognize you! you look different from the beginning of school, you aren't so red and puffy!”

Tell us about your book, Not Weakness: Navigating the Culture of Chronic Pain.

As I have been thinking about pain and its consequences on my life, I have talked with other people (mostly women) about the pain in theirs. I find, from casual conversations as well as more in-depth research, that many more women are in pain than I ever considered. This is humbling and freeing. Though I should have assumed if I had chronic pain so did a good portion of the population. It has always been easy to feel alone.

As I spoke to women, it became clear to me I was not the only one who felt isolated and singular in my daily life in pain. Almost everyone felt the same. What makes us keep quiet? It couldn’t only be the pain that kept us so secluded. There had to be other reasons we felt so disconnected. Not Weakness is a quest to find out what those reasons are. There are over fifty million people in the United States who live in chronic pain. Of those, almost seventy percent of them are women. I am one of those women and I spoke to many more.

While the pain may always be with us, maybe this feeling of isolation doesn’t need to be. Maybe if I can offer a glimpse into my life and the lives of other women who live in pain, it can make us all feel a little less alone. It seems like that’s the real work to be done.

My aim with this book is to tell an in-depth and honest narrative of what it is like to live a life in pain. I have learned it is different for everyone. The arc of my experience is particular only to me and the arcs of others, uniquely theirs. But despite the differences, I understand some universal truths remain: chronic pain makes life immensely difficult, and it does not go away.

Pain is isolating. The battle is on the inside—constant, relentless, often indescribable, and always exhausting. Pain distances us from those we love, igniting cynicism, depression, and loneliness. Pain doesn’t care where you come from, whom you love, where you work, or what you believe in. It just keeps showing up, demanding we pay attention. And when we give pain our attention, we can often feel like no one in the world can understand us—that we are alone in this.

This book is an attempt to show readers in pain they are not alone. It implores them to consider a path of acceptance and to respect the reality and truth of their lives even in a world in which they are rarely understood. It is a memoir, and it tells my story with pain, but it is also a chronicle of the culture of chronic pain in our world and the silence we impart around it.

What I have found is that there are a lot of us. There are more women in chronic pain in my everyday life than I ever imagined. For me, knowing this has been liberating in a way I didn’t expect. I have lived inside the centrifuge of my own pain for so long, I didn’t realize I didn’t have to be in there all alone. Hearing stories of other women’s pain has brought me to a new place in which I can imagine a future of acceptance for all of us.

I can’t take anyone’s pain away, but maybe in writing my story, sharing others, and rooting them in the complex context in which we live, I can remove some of the loneliness and shame that comes along with it and encourage other women to tell their own. I have tried to write my story like an outstretched hand.

This story is my story. But maybe you will see your story here, too. And if you do, my most sincere wish is that my story gives yours voice, makes you feel more connected, and above all else, offers you hope.

Find it here.

Tell us your best advice.

My best advice is this: When you have the choice, choose kind.

One thing I have learned from all my years in pain is that we don't actually get a lot of choices in our lives. We think we do. We think we control most of what happens to us. But this is an illusion. All it takes is one moment, one weird cell, one twinge, one positive test, one bad day, and things can spiral fast. You don't get to choose when you get thyroid cancer, or when a hurricane hits, or when your dad dies, or when your hips decide they don't want to play ball anymore. You rarely get to choose what will happen, even if you prepare and plan and practice.

Certainly, we can do things to steer the ship a bit, but the truth is, the world makes a lot of our choices for us, and our reactions define us more than anything else. When we don't feel well it is easy to fall into a place where we feel best pulling away from the world, knotting up, retreating, and it's particularly hard when it seems like no one else is going through our particular brand of pain. We get angry. We get tired. And sometimes, we get mean.

This is the place where we do have a choice. We can react to things with the venom that is already pulsing through us. Or we can be kind, which is sometimes a heroic act.

Love is big. But kindness is often small. Reaching out instead of recoiling. Checking up instead of writing off. Texting, nodding, smiling. A one-armed hug. A calming song, a cool cloth. A sweet phrase. A favor. A compliment. Small gestures make huge impacts.

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Francesca Grossman is a writer and writing instructor. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Brain, Child Magazine, The Manifest -Station, Ed Week, Drunken Boat, and Word Riot, among others. She runs writing retreats and workshops internationally and leads an annual intensive workshop at The Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has a BA and MA from Stanford University and a doctorate from Harvard University in education. Her acclaimed instructional manual Writing Workshop; How to Create a Culture of Useful Feedback is used in universities and workshops all over the world. Francesca lives in Newton, MA, with her husband and two children.