I got a terrible case of plantar fasciitis a few days ago. Standing up felt like someone was stabbing a ragged knife deep into my heel, and every step was blinding agony. Even lying down off my foot, the base level of constant pain kept it constantly in the foreground of my mind. Stretching, shoe inserts, and painkillers have made things better, fortunately, but one thing I observed was that over the course of the last 36 hours, my worldview shrank considerably.

That is, so much of my mental attention was focused on the pain, and trying to avoid it, mitigate it, whatever, I literally couldn’t pay attention to anything else. I couldn’t read things and understand them properly. I couldn’t make plans. I couldn’t respond with thought and consideration when someone asked me a question. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that something like 80% of my conscious mental bandwidth was thinking about pain 100% of the time.

I am lucky in that I’m not in chronic pain. This was a temporary condition and appears to be improving. I feel like my worldview is opening back up. I don’t know what it’s like to live with chronic pain, but it felt like the world “closed up” in my mind.

The other parallel I have is with learning new things. When I first went to a trackday, I couldn’t “see” the track. I was laser-focused on whatever was right in front of me, because everything was happening at speeds I’d never dealt with before. As I got more comfortable, I could then begin to better see other cars, further down the track, etc. But at the very start, if you’d asked me what kind of car was right in front of me, I don’t think I could have answered you correctly because so much of my mind was occupied by “WTF is even happening???” It was like that with the pain. All I could focus on was what was literally right in front of me, and even then, just barely.

I don’t have any deep insight here, other than I hope to be able to be more forgiving and thoughtful when people who are experiencing this sort of thing need accommodations in the future – not just for the pain, but the impact it has on ones’ ability to interact with literally everything else.