I’ve got a lot of friends between the ages of 20 and 25 that have serious chronic back pain. I myself at 22 have a lot of pain in not quite my hip, not quite my lower back, but somewhere in between. I’ve been told it’s my sciatic nerve. Sometimes that spot feels like a joint that needs to pop, and it does, and it hurts. Sometimes that nerve shoots pain down my leg and up my back so badly that I have a hard time walking and I’ve had to call out of work. On a few occasions where I did too much heavy lifting it’s shot cold down my leg and radiated it across my lower back. I know that one is actually worse, but I prefer it to the pain, since I can walk through cold. The pain sometimes gets to be too much. In addition to that I’m just a touch arthritic. Seriously, I sound like popcorn popping some mornings. When a bad storm comes thru my hips hurt. When it’s really cold out my hips hurt. What really sucks is that if I do too much walking or standing my hips hurt. Some sex positions make my hips cramp up. It sucks.

My sister was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 18. My cousin at 23. My mom in her 30s since when she developed it, it wasn’t recognized as a legit problem yet. For those of you who are unfamiliar, fibromyalgia is a form of arthritis that’s so much fun it gets its own category. Even gout gets limped in with general arthritis. And in addition to chronic fatigue, you also get chronic pain in the muscles and the joints as well as fun pressure points that shoot even more pain.I’m not sure if it stems from too much homework back in high school (most backpacks weighed between 10 and 25 pounds and nobody every carries a backpack properly), or the whole “I’m invincible” factor that seems to plague enough young people that we work jobs we know we shouldn’t but do anyway, but there’s a lot of us who are legitimately in pain quite frequently. At least much more so than we should be for our age. Anybody who’s ever had to deal with pain knows that it can get quite serious, and being younger I’ve noticed older folks tend to be pretty dismissive of younger folks with real pain. I find myself just gritting my teeth and working through the pain because I don’t want to hear “you’re too young for real pain” one more freaking time. I’ve been hearing it from relatives, teachers, colleagues. It gets old. Cuz seriously, pain is pain and if I tell you I can barely walk right now it’s not fair to write me off because I’m “not old enough to have joint pain”.