Humour me for a moment. If you’re reading, try to put yourself in this position. Try your best to imagine this is you in your life. Your friends, co workers and family. This will only really work if you do this.  So:

If you’re a female:

This might sound weird but just humour me:

It’s summer. You’ve just had your birthday celebrations and then you come on your period. Instead of it lasting the usual week or so, it’s not going. You’ve been suffering for 3 months straight with bad period pains every day and night during this time. You haven’t eaten or slept properly during this entire time.

Or if you’re a male:

Let’s keep it simple. Someone has booted you in the bollocks. That feeling of pain and sickness which usually last for minutes has not left you for a month. Again, you’ve had no sleep and have felt constantly sick for 30 days and nights.

So, female or male, this next bit is for everyone:

Both your pains are different. They are both unique but neither can be understood by the other if you were to try to explain. The doctors are baffled by both your ailments and  you’ve been told that there are only a few things that will help to alleviate the pain: lying down in a dark room or laughing.

Times goes by. It is the worst pain you have ever felt

Your friends are starting to lose patience with you. Work has given you as much time off as you’re entitled to and considering no doctors can help you or even see your ailment as a recognised medical problem, your boss is not legally entitled to give you anymore time off.

‘OMG, I’m sick of hearing about this pain of theirs. Every time I invite him/her out they say they can’t because they’re ‘lying down’ or ‘going to the cinema’. What sort of people do this?

Your friends and co workers talk behind your back and you slowly become alienated. Nobody believes what you’re experiencing is real. But people aren’t telling you this outright, it is becoming more obvious as time goes on. Your mental health is suffering, you start taking antidepressants.

Your life is falling apart. You wish people could only understand what your pain felt like every day then everything would be ok!

You lose your job. You need to move into rented accommodation and you cannot claim benefits because your condition does not really exist.

But then..

..one day, you find that when you laugh, the pain feels less intense. So, you start to visit the cinema to watch your favourite comedies that are guaranteed to make you laugh.

It works!

When you’re laughing, your severe period pains or painful bollocks sensation dissipates, it fades away! You feel such intense relief that there is some form of let up from the pain you have felt for so long that you know you can never stop laughing. In fact, you start to feel intense love and happiness again for the first time since your pain began.

Just as you are starting to rebuild your life and find your new ‘normal’, this happens….

…your partner decides to leave you. Your partner takes your children with them, leaving you this note on your fridge:

I’m sick of how everything is about YOU now. How can you complain about your ‘pain’ and then spend all your time at the cinema? 

Damn. You loved this person. You trusted that even they, when nobody else would, would stick by you no matter what and believe in you.

Conclusion to my little story:

The cinema helped you. Laughing helped. But when you laughed, people would raise their eyebrows. When you visited the cinema, despite your intense happiness of being there, people would make comments and question the validity of your claim that you’re  in ‘pain’. Your partner even left you and all your friends turned their backs on you because of the cinema.

Now, a question from me. I genuinely would like to hear what people would do in this situation.

Would you stop going to the cinema or laughing because the people lost faith in you when they saw you doing this? Remember, there is no way for anyone else to know the validity of your pain. 

 

This doesn’t even scratch the surface, but I’m trying. Let’s end this blog with a picture of me visiting my cinema.