“I never set out to make pain the subject of my life’s work. I always thought I would have something more profound to say than, ‘I hurt.’ But all along there was pain in all its protean forms—the stitch-tear uterine hell, the suffocating isolation, the woolen two-headed gloom, the stabs of anxiety, the regret, the loss, the abiding sense of failure. It fouled the well water. Or it was the well water. I can’t tell which. And I found myself trying to make it go away, or deal with it, or explain it, or overcome it…

“Helpful voices have tried to reassure me: Pain is a gift. It is an inspiration. But I refuse to call it a gift. I refuse to deem it some dark muse. I will not knight this poison. Rather, at times, when I am feeling kind to myself, I will permit this consolation. The fact that I am still sitting here, knuckles knotted around a blue Cross pen, does not mean that I have beaten pain, or transformed it, or transcended it. Rather, I have accomplished the brave and ordinary thing of generations. I have endured.”

Anda Boyles, 2003