Premise: Some notes about how I think about and deal with my pain.

I want to make a film that communicates something about my pain and how I deal with it. These are just some notes about that, they aren't very eloquent, this is just me getting some ideas down.

One of the main ways I deal with my pain is to compartmentalise it, to think as though my body is separate from me, and there are different parts of it. So, my pain is my joints or muscles telling me something. Like, 'my back is angry at me'. Like it is a separate entity with opinions about how I live my life. Like, my knees get distressed when I dance about but they don't make my decisions for me, so I can still do some things.

So I'm listening to music while I dance and focusing on that, but if my knees get louder than the music that makes it difficult to push through. So I would have to stop after a while, but music is useful, focusing on other things is useful. Like, I am in charge but if someone yells at me steadily louder for a while it will impact on what I do.

Like, I don't want my brain to seem like cruel dictator or anything, sometimes I have to listen to my body or it will get too loud and I won't be able to do anything. In general I have to remember that I'm in charge, but I need to just take my body's opinion into account to make a good decision. So a lot of the time I'm having to think hard about how I move, I have to decide to ignore my body or listen to it all the time, because it's always there, always having an opinion.

I can't do everything my body tells me, partly because different parts want me to do different things. So I'm standing still at a bus stop and my back is getting agitated, cagey, it wants me to fling myself about a bit, loosen up. My knees though, they want me to sit down and never move again, they're getting really distressed. So if I try to listen to everything I would get all twisted up acting like a total weirdo, while not actually satisfying either body parts request. But also I can't listen to everything because then I would never do anything I want to do and that would be a really sad and difficult way to live. I've tried living like that, it isn't very nice. I'd rather be yelled at by my whole body than sit and stare at a wall for hours on end or do something equally boring.

So, I have a weird relationship to my body, thinking of it as separate and like it is talking to me. It isn't like a dictatorship, like my brain or my body is in charge ordering the other about. Like, maybe an older sibling (my brain) has been left in charge of a really unruly child (my body). This older sibling loves and cares for the child, they care what the child has to say, but OMG is this child annoying and loud and mean, and the child has some really weird requests that make no sense and are just really exhausting. So I'm just living like that, like dragging this annoying child around with me, they are always there, I have to keep them in mind all the time, because I care about them, but also it is pretty difficult to ignore them because they are so loud.