Waking Up to a Very Sore Back

Pretty challenging this morning.

I woke before my alarm, which is never a good sign. The first thing I noticed, even before opening my eyes, was that familiar deep ache. Very sore back on waking! The kind that makes you want to stay horizontal, to not engage with the day at all. It’s one of those mornings where your body reminds you immediately that it’s not in the business of co-operating.

The night behind me hadn’t helped. Took much longer than it should have to get to sleep, and even once I managed to drift off, there was no real rest in it. Sleep felt thin, interrupted by small adjustments and half-awake moments. You know the kind: when you’re not quite asleep and not quite awake, just aware enough to notice you’re uncomfortable. I was not “restful sleeping”, which is generous language for what amounted to lying there in the dark, waiting for morning.

Charlotte woke me properly at 8:30am. Under other circumstances, I might have resented the interruption. But honestly, it was almost a relief to stop pretending I was sleeping. There’s something about just surrendering to the fact that today is here, whether you’re ready or not.

The first thing I did once I was upright was what I always do… I got myself into a hot shower. Water on the back, heat soaking through muscle and tension, is one of the few things that actually reaches the pain in a useful way. There’s no drama to it. It’s not recovery. It won’t fix anything. But for fifteen minutes, it makes the day feel slightly less impossible. I stood there longer than usual, just letting the heat do what it does.

After that came the heat pack on the back once sitting. More of the same logic. Simple, practical, reliable. By this point I was in a chair, having negotiated the morning’s basic requirements, and I could feel the ache beginning to soften at the edges. Not gone. Never gone. But sufficiently managed that I could think about something other than pain.

What strikes me about mornings like this isn’t the pain itself, really. It’s the negotiation. The fact that getting through the first hour requires a sequence of small decisions: hot shower, then sitting, then heat. Each one a small tool rather than a solution. You accept that this is the texture of your morning now. You accept that “pretty challenging” might be how you describe a day when you manage the basics and nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

The acceptance arc isn’t about becoming optimistic about difficult mornings. It’s about showing up to them without the additional weight of anger or disappointment. It’s about knowing, by now, what helps. Warm water. Sitting. Heat. The presence of someone else in the house, even if they’ve accidentally woken you. These small things matter because they’re all you have, and sometimes all you have is actually enough.