Hey, you pressed play. You guys, somebody pressed play! Battle stations, everybody. It's time to podcast.

Welcome. I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human, where we trapes off through the wilderness of our own minds to find out why we do the things we do.

The star of this episode is pain,

how we perceive it,

and how it can change the way that we perceive ourselves.

When I was a teenager, a coffee shop called Muddy Waters

was where all the art and trouble happened.

Muddies was full of ex-addicts, stick and poke tattoos,

poets with their sketchpads, rappers and their skateboards, everybody falling in and out of love

with one another, and almost nobody paying full price for the coffee. Sarah was one of the women who

ran the place. She had long, messy, raspberry-colored hair. It was part PJ Harvey, part Little Mermaid,

and she tolerated zero insolence from anybody. But if you got evicted or fired or pregnant,

she was the port in the storm. A lot of regulars harbored crushes on Sarah. People respected her because she was clever and principled

and brave and she had this extra gravitas because we all knew that she was really, really sick

and in a lot of pain. I became acutely aware of this mystique thing, like the iconic sick,

white female.

It always reminds me of little women.

The, like, tragically ill, pretty one who coughs up blood, talks really quietly, and she's sickly, and everyone loves her.

And I found it so irritating.

Sarah was diagnosed with diabetes when she was 18 months old and with several autoimmune diseases after that.

She ended up needing a bunch of surgeries.

The extreme abdominal pain started when I was probably 16.

...