For many of us living with chronic illness, pain is an unwelcome fact of life. Perhaps it ebbs and flows; perhaps it remains constant—but the experience of pain changes people. Elaine Scarry talks about pain as an “annihilating negation” of self and of the world. She writes about the “unsharability” of pain due to its resistance to language. That is, it’s difficult—if not impossible—to describe to another the experience of pain.

Why might this be? For one thing, pain overwhelms our capacity for thought and language. When we are experiencing acute pain, we often communicate in cries and grunts. Another facet of the difficulty in communicating pain—the focus of this post—is the difficulty of being believed, of being taken seriously. Scarry speaks to this when she writes: “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”

Think about whether Scarry’s perspective rings true for you. When we are in pain, we know it. It is an overwhelming sensation that evades description. When we try to make sense of someone else’s pain, it’s an entirely different processing experience. We use logic and language to categorize it, to shrink it down to a manageable size. There’s nothing wrong with this; in fact, it’s often necessary to........

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