Like Glass
Hold out your hand. Now tighten the muscles in your forearm – not a lot, just enough to be aware that it’s tensed. Hold it.
Permanently.
This is fibromyalgia pain. Well, one of them anyway. The bloody thing is forever surprising me with new and “interesting” qualities of pain it can invent.
You don’t notice it for a while and then, it becomes just an ache. After a couple of days, it’s sore and after a week or two, it’s not a light tensing anymore, it’s a clench and it lets you know all the time how much it hurts. If you have an injury on top of that – like say, your neck and shoulder – double the clench and even if you sit still and meditate and relax things, the minute you start moving again, the injured muscle clenches up as if you’d never had the relief.
