reformatting the pain scale

There is no evidence of pain on my body. No marks. No swelling. No terrible tumor. The X-Rays revealed nothing. Two MRIs of my brain and spine revealed nothing. Nothing was infected and festering, as I had suspected and feared. There was no ghastly huge white cloud on the film. There was nothing to illustrate my pain except a number, which I was told to choose from between zero and ten. My proof.

- Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale”

In December 2021, I was alone in my apartment in New York for weeks. I was in debilitating amounts of pain, yet I tended to rank my pain as a 7 when doctors asked me. I kept asking myself, what does a 7 mean? The distance between 7 and 8 seems minimal, but a 6 versus a 7 haunts me, as 6 is too close to 5 and 5 is too close to 3, which may as well be zero when advocating for your chronic illness.

I started drawing the faces on the pain scale, I drew an angry emoji with flames for eyes as a 10. Then I started reformatting the pain scale – changing the distance between the points, removing zero (if I’m in pain all the time, why would my scale have a zero?).

For this project, we invite people to submit poetry, prose, and other creative work (visual poetry, artwork, etc) that “reformats” the pain scale. This is open to interpretation: you can draw their own faces, your own symbols to represent pain. Flip the pain scale backwards, upside down, remove numbers where you see fit. You can also write an essay, a poem, a venn diagram, literally anything. Represent your pain in a way that feels true to you, not a binary put forth by doctors. Chronic pain cannot be reduced to a number.