Pain is a threat that makes me walk carefully. The dog banging my knuckles, toes knocked against the bedside, a too-outstretched arm, tiny mishaps in an ordinary day are sudden insights of pain. The thought of a slip, a stumble, a fall is unbearable. Every day, the dog and I make our way along the rocks by the beach: he flashing, fast, proud; me carefully behind. I will not fall, I think. I will not, cannot fall. I don't.

Pain is a new territory, a new country, a new culture with new customs. Now that I am privileged to enter here, I look for disabled bathrooms, sigh at hard chairs, shrink from any kind of journey. I discover that in getting on and off buses or airplanes, that long bottom step is a killer.

I count my other privileges: lying down in the long afternoons without guilt at work undone, windows or floors unwashed, wood uncarried, books unwritten. I count these: walking through the blazing autumn, trailing far behind the impatient dog, each step an achievement, each path a negotiation, coming home to peace, a long cup of tea, the chair piled with cushions, an evening full of silence.

Like any transition to a new culture, there has been a period of shock, of learning, of grief at the loss of what was once familiar, of reluctance to assimilate the new. People come at me using words once unfamiliar that now resonate with a power over my life: chronic fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis, immune deficiency, food sensitivities. These people mean well, but I sense they also wish to put me into another cage, one that fits, one that is comfortable, filled with the right kind of food and medication. But so far, none of them have fit properly. People shake their heads and sigh in dismissal.

Doctors also shake their heads. None of the tests are positive. My wonderful friend Carolyn, who is a doctor and alternative health practitioner, says "rheumatoid arthritis." She gives me books and articles and new pills to try. I read that rheumatoid arthritis causes exhaustion and depression as well as painful inflammation of muscles and joints. It's considered incurable. It's considered progressive. I shake my own head. None of this information feels like it applies to me. I don't feel like a person who is ill. I feel like a person in pain, acute pain that will soon go away, if only I can rest enough. But it doesn't, even when I try the pills and diets that people prescribe.

Today I have lunch with a new friend, someone with a bad back. He says he has been forced to learn all about pain management. I am immediately fascinated by the phrase and want to know what he means. From what he says, it seems mostly to have to do with lying down and taking lots of aspirin and not overdoing it on those days, in those moments, when the pain recedes and the sun comes out and life passes, for the closest it gets these days, to what used to be called normal.

He sits across the table. He holds his shoulders rigid. His lips thin and narrow when he moves. I know that face. I feel its mirror on my own. Some days the muscles in my face twitch. For a long while, when things were even more difficult than what passes now for usual, my face kept twitching into a kind of rictus. When I allowed it, followed it, looked in the mirror, it was like a snarl.

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