What Keeps Me Up at Night

Chronic pain, politics, and the new normal

Trump said a whole civilization will die overnight. I jar awake at 2am to check if we’re dead or not. One way or another the headline will not change what I can do, which is nothing, which is the same thing I could do before I checked, but I check anyway because not knowing feels worse than knowing even when knowing is also unbearable.

This is the constant adjustment. This is what it means to live inside something that will not resolve. The chaos arrives in such volume, at such frequency, that the edges of reality start to soften. Is this actually happening? Am I the crazy one for treating it as catastrophic when everyone around me is still making dinner and booking vacations and complaining about parking? The apocalyptic becomes a register, a tone, a weather system you move through daily, and you start to wonder if your alarm is the problem, if your nervous system has miscalibrated, if the people who seem fine are fine or if they have simply gone somewhere you haven’t been able to follow. Normalization feels like sanity from the inside. That is what makes it so dangerous.

And then at some point, without choosing it, you numb out. Not a decision. Just the body doing what bodies do when the pain has gone on long enough. You stop flinching. You stop checking what time it is in Gaza. You make dinner. You book the doctor appointment. You complain about the weather. The numbing is not peace. It is the system protecting itself the only way it knows how, by feeling less, by letting the signal drop, by going somewhere quieter inside while the world continues to be what it is outside. It is exhausting to feel it all. It is also exhausting to stop. There is no version of this that is not exhausting.

And yet the body is running at a constant six out of ten. Not crisis. Not fine. Just the hum of it, always there, the baseline that used to be an aberration and is now just Tuesday. You stop remembering what good felt like. You try sometimes: what would it be to wake up and not check the phone. To move through a morning without the ache, without the low-grade dread, without calculating which pain is loudest today and whether you can afford to ignore it. To feel, in the body and in the world, something that could honestly be called okay.

You can’t quite get there. The imagination of it has started to blur. Good is something that happened before, in a before that is getting harder to locate. And you wonder if this is what it means to have lived long enough inside the chronic: not that you have accepted it, but that you have simply forgotten the alternative. The absence of pain as a feeling you no longer have access to, even in memory. Even in hope.

That is the real loss. Not the pain itself. The forgetting of what it was to be without it.

Once a month, with the moon, the pelvic spasms come at night. It strangles me out of sleep before my brain has registered what is happening. I surface breathless, body already in crisis, mind arriving late to a scene it doesn’t yet understand. Some nights I reach for my phone before I even know why I’m awake. The spasm and the headline arrive in the same dark. By now I am not always sure which one woke me first.

There is another that comes without warning. Sharp. Rhythmic. It moves in waves, each one arriving before the last has finished, and between them the body goes completely still because any shift, any breath that lands wrong, lights everything on fire. There is no working through it. There is only the stillness and the waiting. Kidney stone pain. Some say it is the worst there is.

This is how it reads, from here. Bombing, then starvation, then demolition, then disease, then bombing again. Wave after wave, each arriving before the last has finished, no relief between them, no breath between them, the body under sustained assault that cannot catch itself, cannot prepare, can only go still and wait. More than 72,000 dead since October 2023. Nearly the entire enclave reduced to rubble. Not a single system left intact. We know this the way the body knows the wave is coming: before we can stop it, before there is anything to do but brace.

There is no working through it. There is only the stillness and the waiting, and then exhaustion, which starts to feel like relief.

The kidney stone is often compared to labour. But labour has a terrible productivity. Something is being made. There are no sweet babies at the end of a kidney stone, only a small rock in the toilet, if you are lucky. If you are not lucky there are lasers. There is being shot apart from the outside to dislodge what formed on the inside.

But it ends.

The aftermath of labour goes on. And on. And on. A body that was one thing and is now another, permanently. The pelvis remembers. The pelvic floor remembers. The selfhood bisected and rearranged and handed back in a different configuration, here, figure it out. Labour ends. Motherhood does not end. A concession that ended one war drawing the borders that start another. The treaty held until it didn’t. The peace that partitioned land lives in that land still, unresolved, permanent, a different configuration of the same wound.

The aftermath goes on.

The migraine starts with a sparkle. A firework at the edge of vision. The pain isn’t here yet but it’s coming. There is a little time: get somewhere dark, cancel what needs cancelling, prepare for the takeover. The warning before the strike. The sense of something gathering before anyone has admitted there will be a strike.

By the time it has decided what it is, it is too late. The electric nerve from the ear to the hinge of the jaw. The eye socket stabbing. The burning wire threaded through from one to the other. Light becomes an enemy. Sound becomes an enemy. Scent is overpoweringly nauseating. Into the dark, and if you have waited too long, tried to push through, tried to remain functional, the migraine makes its point with vomit that tastes like metal.

The news cycle works like this. The sparkle before each assault: the executive order, the tariff, the threat, the rhetoric about kidnapping, the suggestion that a whole civilization will die overnight. Each one arriving before the last has finished. The nervous system, individual and collective, has a ceiling. The overwhelm is a tactic. A body in the dark waiting for the metal taste to pass is not a body that is watching. A citizenry in the dark is not a citizenry that is watching. That is the point. That has always been the point.

Exhaustion, when it comes, feels like relief. Learning to want the exhaustion: that is the most dangerous adjustment of all.

And then there is the chronically dysfunctional hip.

It does not announce itself. It accumulates. It is the pain that wakes at three in the morning, dull and throbbing, a complaint from somewhere unreachable, impossible to stretch to, impossible to ice or heat into silence. It has been there so long it gets forgotten sometimes, which is its own problem, because then you move wrong and something sharp breaks through to remind you. It never left. It was just waiting.

Some wars sit like this. Five years now. The ceasefire agreed for Orthodox Easter, violated thousands of times before the day was out. Ground traded back and forth, a mile here, a mile there, at a cost that doesn’t make sense in any unit of measurement. Peace talks stalled. Washington’s attention has moved to Iran, the new acute crisis, and Ukraine gets pushed under again the way the hip always loses to the migraine, the way the chronic always loses to the acute. It is still there. It has always been there. The war is still happening while we look somewhere else.

And then, when things quiet enough to notice, there is the hair.

Not pain. A wrongness. Something showing up on the pillow, in the brush, in the drain. The body is telling you something is off at a systemic level, something upstream that hasn’t been named yet, something in the chemistry that the bloodwork gestures toward without resolving. You are not sick in a way anyone can point to. You are just losing something, and the loss is visible but the cause stays just out of reach. Another round of tests. More waiting.

This is the climate. No acute announcement, no single wave to brace against. Just the slow systemic wrongness accumulating in the data: the bleaching percentages, the parts per million, the species counts, the ice cores. Eighty-four percent of the world’s coral reef area already under heat stress. The fourth global bleaching event, the worst on record, still unfolding. Scientists watching temperatures with growing dread, asking whether this is the year the tipping point is reached for warm-water coral, the point beyond which even the most resilient cannot recover. We keep running the tests. We know what they will show. The loss is visible. The cause is known. The cost doesn’t disappear. It moves.

And there are the others. The ones that take their turn.

TMJ flaring when it has its moment. The old knee injury announcing itself after a long walk. The pelvic spasm arriving uninvited with the change of the month. You cannot feel them all at once, which is the only mercy. The brain will not hold attention to all ailments at the same time. They rotate. They wait. They push to the front when something else quiets, and you attend to them briefly, and then something louder arrives and they recede again, unresolved, patient in the way that chronic things are patient.

Lebanon. The West Bank. The Amazon. The permafrost, holding what it has held for ten thousand years and holding, and the slow warmth rising toward it. Each one waiting for its moment in the rotation. None of them resolved. The system never quite well, never knowing when it in crisis, just chronically, persistently not right.

You take the painkillers because the alternative is unbearable. You take them and they work, up to a point, and then you notice the stomach. The burn. The new pain somewhere else. The cost doesn’t disappear. It transfers.

This is what fear does when it is sustained long enough without relief. It reaches for the thing that promises to make it stop. It turns. A reach for something that says: I know who did this to you. Let’s address it. The extremism that follows is the ulcer. Not the original wound. The consequence of the fix. A new pain in a different place, and it doesn’t care what caused it. It just burns.

We are a system taking too many painkillers. The stomach is starting to go.

This is what sustained pain does. The threshold shifts. Things that should register as urgent don’t. Things that are not urgent break through anyway because the system is dysregulated, no longer calibrated. You stop knowing what is an emergency and what is just Tuesday. The outrage that should be sharp goes dull from overuse. The dull ache that needed tending for decades keeps getting drowned out and the tiredness sets in, not from one hard day but from the long accumulation of days that did not resolve, that asked everything and gave nothing back.

We no longer know what to feel first. We no longer trust our own signal.

Fatigue is not apathy. The numbness is not indifference. It is what happens to a system that has been in pain too long without relief, without repair, without anyone addressing the underlying condition. The body stops trusting itself. That is the most dangerous thing. That is what they are waiting for.

And when you ignore it, things get worse. The hip ignored becomes the hip that wakes you at 3am with something sharp. The migraine pushed through becomes the vomit that tastes like metal. The ferritin left untreated becomes the hair in the drain, the fatigue that won’t lift, the body quietly failing at something you didn’t notice until it was harder to fix.

The world moves the same way. The crisis ignored compounds. The chronic unaddressed becomes the acute. The slow becomes the sudden.

Can I afford to push through? What consequence will wake me tomorrow night?

This is the calculation a person with chronic pain makes every day. How much can I do today without paying for it tonight. How much can I ignore and still function. Where is the line between managing and making it worse. You never know exactly. You push, and wait, and find out.

Something will wake us. Or it won’t. Maybe we will just accept it, roll over, check the phone, see that a civilization is still dying, and go back to sleep because there is nothing to be done and the alarm is set for seven and the children need lunches and the hip is manageable today and manageable is enough. Maybe that is what happens. Maybe that is already what is happening.

The new normal is not a destination. It is a process. You don’t arrive there. You just notice one day that you are already inside it, that the thing that would have been unthinkable is now just Wednesday, that you have recalibrated without deciding to, that the baseline has shifted so gradually you can no longer find where it began.

Will something wake us?

Or have we already learned to sleep through it?