“I left my body lying in a ditch somewhere. In its place I drag around someone elses corpse. It wears my face and stole my voice, but I can feel the way it struggles to fit inside my skin. The joints are rotting as I speak: jaw stiff and strangling, fingers numb and cold, tendons poised to snap.
This body doesn’t belong to me.”
So begins my book on the effects of chronic pain in conjunction with my own experience. The drumleaf bound book is a combination of letterpress and intaglio prints that focus on the use of metaphor, ink, and physicality to give presence and relatability to chronic pain. This book is a reflection on the emotional and psychological effects of pain as part of a long-term and invisible disorder. It is a place to create visual and text based language around the reality of living with chronic pain that surpasses simple definitions and medical journal criteria, to convey not what chronic pain is, but what it feels like to be in pain everyday for the foreseeable future.