Chronic pain is super bad. There is nothing good about it. There are no lessons to be learned from it. The intractable post-covid migraine that I had for eight months taught me nothing except that pain sucks. It blots out everything else in your awareness, and it changes you.

The acid trip I took one month before the onset of the forever-migraine prepared me to learn this. It also, therefore, prepared me to learn that there was nothing good about the trauma I endured as a child. It was not a good thing even if good things came out of it. Pain is bad. Pain, extended too long, destroys you in ways you never imagined were possible. Pain should be minimized. Perhaps not a revolutionary idea for most people, but I needed to learn this as an ex-Catholic, because I was taught that suffering pain was inherently virtuous.

My personal experience with covid also taught me that my health is so much more fragile than I thought it was. I put a heavy burden on my body to work as hard as I did pre-covid. When you lose your health, no one will be there to catch you. Society will leave you behind and doctors will scoff at you. It will just be you, alone, in silence, with the screaming pain of your body and the tightness in your lungs.