Journal

Two Years, One Walk, and What I Learned About Chronic Pain

Two years ago, over Easter weekend, I damaged my Achilles tendon on a walk. I knew something was wrong at about the mile point. I walked the whole loop anyway.

That was the first mistake. There were several more to follow.

How I Made It Worse

What happened next is, I think, pretty common for people who live with chronic illness. I added the injury to the pile. A bit of frozen peas, keeping it up for an hour, then trying to walk through the pain, then resting, then trying again. Six months of that particular cycle.

By the time I eventually saw a podiatrist and got a scan, the damage was visible - not just on the scan but to the naked eye. One heel is a noticeably different shape from the other. There was clear tendon damage and a lot of bursitis.

I got custom insoles. I was told not to walk through pain above a four out of ten. I tried to follow that advice. It didn’t improve.

Then last summer, my dad became very ill. I was driving to Edinburgh constantly, manual car, the traffic was awful and crawlled along, clutch up and down constantly. The foot got worse. By late July I was struggling to walk from the car park to the hospital entrance. Every step had a burning sensation when I put my foot down - if you’ve had it, you know exactly what I mean. I was very anxious about it, because walking is central to how I think and function.

My Dad died at the end of August. In September I went back to the podiatrist. Another scan. No change. He suggested I think about an operation. He also mentioned, almost as an aside on the way out, that acupuncture had helped some people, though it wasn’t something he could offer.

Acupuncture it was, then. Except there was a five-month waiting list, so I was looking at February.

The Thing That Actually Shifted It

The following day I had a Reiki appointment with Carrie, my Reiki practitioner. I’m a pragmatic person - touch it, feel it, believe it - and Reiki came at me sideways a few years ago and rather upended that. I’ve written about it elsewhere. The point is, I went to Carrie and I talked about the foot. But I also talked about something else that had been on my mind: whether I’d been leaning too hard into being an introvert, to the point where I was becoming genuinely afraid to go out. Whether, in fact, that fear and the foot pain might be connected.

Carrie didn’t laugh. She did some Reiki on the foot and then sent me some links to interesting reading afterwards.

The next morning, for the first time in two years, I got out of bed and walked to the bathroom without that burning pain. There was still discomfort - the tendon hadn’t magically repaired itself - but the pain was different in quality. Manageable.

Over the following weeks it continued to improve. I started walking further. I cancelled the acupuncture appointment because there wasn’t enough pain left to justify it.

What the Research Showed

The links Carrie sent me were not spiritual. They were about the neuroscience of chronic pain, specifically about something called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT).

The idea is this: with acute pain, the brain registers an injury and sends a danger signal. With chronic pain - particularly when anxiety or overwhelm is present - the brain can take over that pain response and maintain it even after the original injury site has stabilised. Brain imaging shows that chronic pain activates different regions than acute pain does; it moves from the part of the brain connected to the physical site into regions associated with memory, emotion, and storytelling.

This is not the same as saying the pain is imaginary or not real. It is entirely real. But the source, for many people, shifts.

The framework made sense of something that had not made sense before. My injury was real and visible. The treatment hadn’t worked. The pain had got worse in a period of intense stress and fear. And it got better when something shifted my sense of safety.

Whether that’s PRT, neuroplasticity, the specific effect of Reiki, or some combination - I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that I’m walking again.

What I’m Actually Doing Now

The protocol I’ve been following has two main components.

The first is reassurance - telling myself, specifically and out loud if necessary, that I am safe. This sounds slightly absurd and also, for me, it works. Reiki helps with this; it gives me a very particular sense of being in the right place and moving in the right direction. I find it calming in a way that doesn’t require me to understand why.

The second is almost overexposure - going to the places and situations that felt threatening and showing my body that they’re survivable. Concerts. Busy streets. Trains. And stairs.

Which brings me to Naples, where I’m writing this. If you’ve seen photographs of the city, you’ll know it rises steeply from the sea. Most of that rise is done via staircase. I walked to lunch somewhere I thought was nearby and discovered there were 32 flights of stairs between me and the food. That is, it turns out, quite good rehabilitation.

Why I’m Telling You This

I very rarely talk about health directly in this blog. Everyone’s health is different, everyone’s circumstances are different, and I have no wish to give advice about something I’m not qualified to advise on.

But I’m sharing this because I wish I’d known about this a year and a half ago, before the world started to feel like it was closing in.

If you have pain that gets worse under stress, that is sometimes there and sometimes not, that started after an identifiable injury but didn’t improve as expected - it might be worth looking at this research. Not because I’m saying it’s the answer, but because it’s a possibility that doesn’t seem to get much airtime.

Resources

These are the links Carrie sent me, plus the research I found myself:

Books

• The Way Out by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv — the most accessible introduction to PRT, written by one of the researchers behind the Boulder study
• Unlearn Your Pain by Dr Howard Schubiner — more clinical in approach, also useful

Podcasts

• Tell Me About Your Pain — hosted by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv
• Like Mind, Like Body — from the team behind the Curable app; covers the neuroscience behind the mind-body connection in chronic pain

Film

• Pain Brain (on Vimeo) — a documentary following the Boulder Back Pain Study and the development of PRT. Features Alan Gordon and shows brain-based approaches to chronic pain in practice.

For the research itself

• The Boulder Back Pain Study: Ashar et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021 — the full paper is accessible via PubMed
• University of Colorado Boulder summary (more readable): CU Boulder Today
• And for balance, a sceptical but fair analysis of the research: PainScience.com

Being fully where you are

Every February I leave rural Scotland and move to Naples for a month. Not on holiday. I take my work with me, my laptop and my phone, and I just... relocate. I rent an apartment with a balcony looking out over the bay, and I do exactly the same work I’d be doing at home, just somewhere else.

People find this confusing. I live in Stirlingshire, gateway to the Highlands, about five minutes from Loch Lomond. My studio is in a meadow that runs down to a little wood. There are deer and buzzards and hares. It is exactly the kind of place the wellness industry tells us we should all be heading towards. And I leave it for one of the most chaotic cities in Europe.

I’ve started calling it my silent retreat, which gets even more confused looks.

What I’m actually doing there

The trip isn’t about Naples specifically, though I love it. It’s about what happens when I strip away all the layers I’ve built up during the year.

Because that’s what happens, gradually.As news gets more distressing, social media gets more toxic, the world feels more overwhelming, and without quite noticing, I start to cocoon. I fill every gap. Cooking with an audiobook on headphones. Walking with a podcast. Checking emails in every spare moment. I get busy for the sake of busyness. I layer on noise and distraction until there’s no space left for anything to get in.

We are not made for 24-hour rolling news. We’re village-gossip-level creatures. We can’t have the whole world’s horror beamed into us without it doing harm. And yet we pile it on, and then pile on more noise to cope with it.

It feels like protection. It is protection, of a sort. But it comes at a cost.

The cost of cocooning

When you armour yourself against the difficult things, you also armour yourself against the good things. You stop noticing. Colour, light, the way a street looks at a particular time of day, the smell of coffee from a doorway. All of that gets muffled along with the horror.

And there’s a wider cost too. Research consistently shows that people who doom-scroll most are actually the least able to help. They don’t have the spare capacity, whether that’s political engagement, financial giving, or simply time. So the very thing that feels like engagement with the world’s problems is actually pulling people further from being able to do anything useful about them.

Taking the armour off isn’t about ignoring what’s happening in the world. It’s about being in a state where you can actually respond to it.

Why a chaotic city works

This is where it gets interesting, because the wellness industry has sold us a very specific story: that restoration means nature, silence, escape. Get to the countryside. Walk in the woods. Find somewhere quiet.

I’m not arguing against any of that. But I am saying it’s not the whole picture. The assumption that cities are depleting while nature is healing doesn’t hold up when you look at the research.

It turns out that what actually restores us isn’t silence or greenery per se. It’s a particular quality of attention that psychologists call soft fascination. This is when things come to you gently, without demanding anything. Waves on a shore. Leaves moving in wind. Washing hanging on a line. A dog sitting on a doorstep. People having coffee at a pavement table. These things give your brain just enough stimulation to be occupied without being overwhelmed, and that’s what allows it to rest and open up.

This is the opposite of rolling news, where one disaster follows another follows a fight. Soft fascination is calm. It comes to you. You don’t have to seek it out.

And crucially, this happens in cities as well as in countryside. Sometimes better.

What the research actually says

I went looking for evidence because I wanted to know whether my experience of Naples as genuinely restorative was just personal preference or something more. What I found surprised me.

There’s a significant body of research, mostly from town planning and environmental psychology rather than the wellness industry, that challenges the idea that nature is uniquely restorative.

A 2013 study by Lindal and Hartig looked at residential streetscapes and found that architectural variation (different building heights, varied facades, surface ornamentation) had a larger effect on people’s sense of restoration than vegetation did. Architecture mattered more than greenery.

Wang and colleagues, in 2023, found that historical buildings scored highest on what researchers call the “fascination dimension,” that quality of holding your attention gently. The rich facades of old buildings, the cultural layering, the sense of time passing through a place: all of this had measurable restorative effects.

A 2008 study by Karmanov and Hamel directly compared urban and natural environments and found that a well-designed city space could have stress-reducing power equal to an attractive natural one.

And a 2021 review by Subiza-Pérez and colleagues concluded that “the typical dichotomy between low restorative built environments and high restorative natural environments needs re-examination.” Historic interiors and courtyards showed restorative potential similar to natural settings.

None of this means nature isn’t good for us. Of course it is. But it does mean that the story we’ve been told, that you need to escape to the countryside to feel restored, is incomplete at best and actively unhelpful for a lot of people.

The elitism problem

This matters because “get out into nature” isn’t available to everyone. Not everyone has access to countryside. Not everyone can afford a retreat. Not everyone lives near green space, and even where parks exist, they’re not always the peaceful havens the wellness industry imagines. The park near my Naples apartment is mostly closed, full of litter, and not remotely restorative.

But almost everyone has access to a street where things are happening. A café where you can sit and watch people. A market. A walk through a neighbourhood with different buildings and doorways and life unfolding.

Telling people that wellness requires nature, and specifically rural nature, creates a gap between what people are told they need and what they actually have. It makes ordinary life feel inadequate. And it isn’t true.

What Naples gives me

Naples works for me because it’s impossible to cocoon there. The traffic alone requires you to pay attention. There appear to be no rules, certainly no markings on the roads, and scooters swerve between cars at speed. In practice, pedestrians are king. If I walk out onto a road, cars will either stop or go around me. But it doesn’t feel like that. You would not wander around with headphones on.

Beyond the traffic, it’s a city of extraordinary texture. Around every corner there’s something. Washing strung between buildings. Shrines tucked into walls. Markets spilling onto pavements. Dogs sitting on chairs. Coffee shops where you can sit and watch it all unfold. None of it is asking for my attention in the way a notification or an algorithm does. It’s just there, and if I’m open to it, it comes in.

After a few days I notice my attention changing. I start off photographing the obvious things: the views, the processions, the washing lines. But soon I’m taking pictures of damp on walls, grass pushing through drains, the colour of a fishing net in a plastic bin. My brain has opened up. I’m noticing beauty in things I’d normally walk straight past.

That’s what soft fascination does. That’s what taking the armour off feels like.

You don’t need Naples

I appreciate that moving to Italy for a month is not available to most people, and that’s not what I’m suggesting. The point is that the practice works anywhere. Deliberately removing layers of noise and distraction. Going out without headphones. Walking slowly. Letting things come to you.

Your street has things worth noticing. Your local café has people worth watching. The buildings you walk past every day have details you’ve never registered. Tate Modern in London is free, and you can go in, find a seat, and just watch people move around the space. That is soft fascination in practice.

Start small. Take a walk without your headphones. Accept that it might feel uncomfortable. It probably will, because you put the armour on for a reason. But try it and see what you notice.

It’s good for your creativity. But actually, I think it’s bigger than creativity. It’s about being properly alive to the world you’re living in.

This blog accompanies my Friday Film “Why Naples?”

 I’m Jane, and I run The Studio, an online creative membership for women who want to slow down and make with intention. If what I’ve been talking about here sounds like something you need, you can find out more

Sources 

1. Lindal & Hartig (2013) - Architecture > vegetation: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257104788_Architectural_variation_building_height_and_the_restorative_quality_of_Urban_residential_streetscapes 

2. Wang et al. (2023) - Historical buildings highly restorative: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1132052/full

3. Subiza-Pérez et al. (2021) - Challenging the dichotomy: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717116/full

4. Weber & Trojan (2018) - Systematic review: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6256310/ OR: https://bioone.org/journals/environmental-health-insights/volume-12/issue-1/1178630218812805/The-Restorative-Value-of-the-Urban-Environment--A-Systematic/10.1177/1178630218812805.full

5. Karmanov & Hamel (2008) - Urban equal to nature: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223433110_Assessing_the_restorative_potential_of_contemporary_urban_environments_Beyond_the_nature_versus_urban_dichotomy

 

Is This Performative? Wearing our convictions on our sleeves

Every year I spend a few weeks in Naples, and every year the community marching bands gather on the street below my balcony to practise for the Easter processions. Last March, before they got to their usual repertoire, they played “Enola Gay” by OMD — an anti-war song from 1980. It turned out to be a quiet act of protest. That same day, the news was reporting that the word “gay” was being scrubbed from American government records, including references to the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

A religious marching band in southern Italy, playing a 45-year-old pop song as resistance. Nobody told them to. Nobody was filming it for content. They just did it.

The red hat

I’ve been knitting a lot of the Melt the Ice hat recently. The pattern comes from Needle & Skein, a yarn shop in Minneapolis, and it’s based on Norwegian red hats — pointed, tasselled — that were worn during the Nazi occupation as a form of visible opposition. The Nazis eventually made them illegal, which tells you something about how well they were working.

All the money from the pattern goes to charities supporting immigrant communities in Minneapolis. That money is tangible and vital. But what interests me more is the other thing the hat does. It makes you visible. It puts your body in a public space wearing something that says: this is what I believe.

And it creates space for conversation. “I like your hat.” “Did you knit that?” “What’s the story?” Suddenly you’re explaining why you made it, where the money goes, what’s been happening. That is not nothing. That is how ideas spread between actual humans.

Suffragette colours

It reminded me of the first piece of antique clothing I ever bought — an Edwardian silk walking suit from about 1912, made by Frasers in Glasgow. Impeccably tailored, beautifully weighted, clearly bespoke. And embroidered in what now looks like grey and purple, but when you look at the inside, where the colour hasn’t faded, you can see it’s purple and green. Suffragette colours.

This outfit was worn hard — the underarms are in quite a state. Somebody wore this regularly, in public, as a statement.

At the time, you could buy suffragette jewellery, bags, ribbons, hatbands, buttons. There was a whole spectrum from high-end pieces with amethysts and peridots down to cheap accessories you could pin onto your own clothes. The point was to be seen. To show how many of you there were. To make the cause visible and countable.

This was not without risk. The suffragettes were opposed by the establishment, by many women, by the press. Wearing the colours meant nailing your beliefs to the mast in a way that could draw hostility.

They did it anyway.

The word “performative”

The Melt the Ice hat has been attacked on social media as being “performative.” I haven’t seen the comments myself — I left Twitter years ago and never joined Threads, which I’m grateful for — but I know they’re out there, and I suspect many of them are bots. They’re designed to make people hesitant, to erode confidence, to make you feel that whatever you’re doing isn’t enough.

“Performative” became a dismissal around 2020, part of cancel culture’s vocabulary. Before that, it had a very different meaning. Performance — the act of embodying something publicly — has always been central to protest. The marching band was performing their beliefs. The Norwegian hat-wearers were performing theirs. The suffragettes were giving a visible, physical performance of their values every time they walked out the door.

It comes from inside. It is brave. And there is nothing less “performative” — in the dismissive sense — than something you have to put genuine effort and skill into. Knitting a hat takes time. Knitting hats for your friends takes more time. That is commitment made physical.

I also wonder whether the hat gets this criticism specifically because it’s rooted in traditionally female craft. The suffragette clothes were dismissed as vanity and triviality too. There’s a pattern here.

The danger of silence

I read The Crooked Cross by Sally Carson at the end of last year — written in 1933, published in 1934, recently reprinted by Persephone Books. It follows the story of an engaged couple in Bavaria as the Nazi party rises to power. By New Year’s Eve, the man has lost his job. By the end of January, his apartment. We know the story.

What struck me so forcibly is that everyone in the book keeps quiet. There’s this belief that if nobody says anything, if you just stay out of the way, you’ll be safe. The father has misgivings but never voices them. The silence is the most frightening thing in the book.

Carson wrote it in real time, before the full horrors were known. That’s what makes it so powerful — and so urgent now.

Why being seen matters

The power of protest isn’t only rallies and donations and writing to your representatives. All of those are important. But it is also this: showing your views. Wearing them. Talking about them. Creating visible evidence that there are many of us who think this way.

When you speak about what you believe, you get more agency. You feel more intentional. It is a positive cycle. Visibility breeds courage breeds more visibility.

And there is nothing worse than the invisibility and silence of the people who could make a difference.

So if someone tells you that knitting a red hat is performative — good. That’s exactly what it is. A performance of your beliefs, made with your hands, worn on your body, sparking conversations wherever you go.

That has always been how change starts.

 

Artist Dates as Resistance: Why Random Matters More Than Ever

At the end of last year, someone mentioned The Artist’s Way in one of our Studio Bee gatherings. Lots of members had done it years ago - found it useful, then somehow let it fall away. The practice they remembered most was artist dates: weekly solo outings to feed your creative self.

We decided to pick it up in The Studio, sharing our artist dates in the forum each month. And as I started taking them myself, I realised they matter even more now than they did when Julia Cameron first wrote about them in 1992.

We’re being spoon fed by algorithms. Pinterest shows us more of what we click. Audible recommends books based on what we’ve already read. Instagram feeds us the same aesthetic over and over. And AI is making this worse, not better - it’s just scooping from an increasingly limited pool.

If we want to think original thoughts, make unexpected connections, see beyond the safe playpen the algorithm builds around us, we need to step into analog randomness. Deliberately.

In this week’s Friday Film, I share three artist dates I took - a museum visit, an old graveyard, a dusty antique shop - and what each one taught me about thinking outside the algorithm’s reach.

This isn’t about self-care. It’s about resistance.