Indeed, as others have said, it has severely limited what I am able to do. Before things were bad I was a hiker, horseback rider, martial artist, waterskier and many other things besides. Now I am limited to doing Tai Chi and spending most of my time resting because I don't have the energy or pain threshold to do most of the things I used to do. I need to rest frequently, often have to cancel plans due to pain and/or fatigue, and wrestle with the tasks of daily living like making food, cleaning my house... all of those things. I am unable to hold a regular job because I have yet to find a job where I can just go on days that I feel good.
The limits to my activity are difficult and debilitating, but what's worse is how people treat me. They think I'm lying; they think I'm lazy; they don't understand why I'm tired. My husband, who is disabled as well, finds it difficult to understand why I am constantly unable to do simple things. He doesn't understand why something as "simple" as going to church on Sundays leaves me exhausted for the rest of the day to the point where I need to sleep for several hours after church in order to recover.
As far as "ignore the pain and accept it" goes if you had an icepick in your hips (both of them) and your back felt like you had someone slamming it with a sledgehammer someone telling you to just "ignore it" would earn them a punch to the nose. I can handle pain. I have a very, very high pain threshold. I nearly carved off one of my fingers with a knife and was able to function well enough to perform first aid on myself and orchestrate my trip to the hospital. I also tore my meniscus and did severe damage to my knee and was able to drag myself inside and up a flight of stairs without assistance while maintaining a clear head. Having a high pain threshold does not make me able to be "normal".
While I agree that, to some extent, learning to operate while in pain and pushing through pain is a good thing doing this is exhausting on all faculties. Being in constant pain is not something you can just live with without repercussions. Even though the pain is "not caused by anything" we can figure, it still exists. It is still taxing on the body because your body is responding to things. It's dumping endorphins into your system to combat the pain (and endorphins interact with the brain the same way morphine does). When your body runs out of the endorphins it leaves you feeling exhausted because all that pain your body was busy making you not feel all took a toll on you whether you were conscious of it or not.
If you were to treat this the same way you'd treat any other illness... well telling someone who has cancer to "just ignore the pain" isn't going to work. Telling someone who has carpal tunnel to "just ignore the pain" certainly won't help matters. Telling someone who has clinical depression to "stop being sad"... none of those mindsets help. In fact, it just creates a bigger gap between you and your friend because it makes you sound callous. And it demonstrates a lack of understanding that you are dealing with a legitimate disease and condition. "just ignore the pain" doesn't provide any helpful insight.
Wallowing in your pain and never learning to handle it isn't healthy, but expecting someone to ignore it is worse. My two cents.
