When pain is pathologized as only opportunity, it disavows a basic human truth. It is certainly true that life’s worst moments hold the greatest opportunities for growth. But when we believe it is the only choice, we lose our connection to humanity.
Thinking that pain and suffering happens because it is a step on the path to a better life is reductive at best. Is that what life is? Learning your lesson? Your new perspective, your new appreciation for life should mean it was all worth it? Even that phrasing, “worth it”, yuck. Life is the invaluable. Something cannot have value unless it can lose value, which life cannot.
The products of pain and suffering do not make going through it any easier.
Better is probably the the wrong way to think about it. Growth isn’t quite it either. Cause when I say that having cancer has made me a better person it feels like I’m denying how much it upended my life for the worse. And saying that I’ve grown from cancer leaves out the ways in which my life has been forced to shrink. But it hasn’t made my life singularly worse either.
Growth is measured in terms of reference, it requires a comparison. But depth, depth is measured in terms of how much something can hold.
Better is associated with overcoming, moving on, rebirth. With taking what was and turning it into something new. With recovering from harm. Stronger. This is what we want.
But deeper. Deeper is associated with digging in. With finding the bottom. Deep connotes both lowness (sound) and richness (color). It involves something profound, and, also, mysterious. This is what we get.
It’s true, we do have a choice in how we respond to difficult circumstances. And yes, those circumstances are ripe with opportunity for growth. But it is not an either or proposition. The choice is usually warped, answered before it’s even asked. It gets posed as, you can either learn/grow from it, or you can let it ruin your life.
The siren song of transformative suffering is so alluring because it gives back what was taken from us, control. Of course we don’t want our life to be in ruin, but that doesn’t have to deny the fact that it might be.
There are other options, I promise. Like, I don’t know, we could actually feel things and spend time processing. And why did you read that as a failure in your head?
I get it. You wanna bolt out of the processing and get back to LIVINNNNNNN’, right? That feeling bad stuff isn’t livinnnnn’ man, I wanna get back to feeling GOOOOOD. (Sorry just finished McCounaughey’s book.)
Where did you get the idea that life was only worth living when you’re feeling good?
Life will require us to keep moving. And we assume that means forward. But have we ever considered that moving downwards, sinking in, is moving too? Have we ever sat down right where we are and let our body weight sink into the clay of our life, so much so that it almost comes out the other side?
Going through tough stuff forces us to see the other side. Suffering offers, no, suffering stuffs down our throat, a more complete picture of what it means to be human.
I read somewhere that having a chronic illness is like having two jobs. I joke, mostly with myself, that my second job is turning shitty days into good days. Maybe I should monetize this side hustle. Uber but for chronic cancer. “Hop in, we’re headed straight for bed.”
I wake up a lot of mornings and feel like I have to put on this act. Like I have to put away my fatigue and my frustration and smile through. That I have to hide that part of myself because no one wants to deal with it. Especially me. One of the hardest parts of my second job is feeling like I should be handling it well. And that if I don’t handle it well, that I’m somehow failing. What I really mean by “handling it well” is making it seem like I’m not struggling at all.
It’s so weird when people talk about what they admire in those struggling with something. It’s like “oh he handled it so well, you would never know something was wrong” or, “he took it in stride, never really mentioned it or complained about anything”. As if that’s something we should be striving for?
I usually want to avoid telling others that I’m struggling because I know they don’t like to see me struggle. But when I tell them I’m feeling alright, when I’m not, that untruth crushes me. It leaves me feeling like, “if only they really knew”. It also denies the opportunity for exactly what I need in those moments. Which is, I see you and still love you when you’re like this.
Repression often masquerades as “growth”. Maybe the reason we want to springboard out of suffering has more to do with our belief that we shouldn’t be feeling that way in the first place, and less to do with wanting to learn/grow from it. Not letting anyone else in on how much you struggle doesn’t really feel that admirable. What’s admirable is telling the truth, being open, not hiding anything.
This brings me to the big lie at the heart of the transformative suffering narrative. And bless me, cause I feel like Barney typing this out. The lie is that hiding our feelings is good for us. And that if we get good enough at hiding them, or dealing with them, that they should just go away.
Hiding your feelings is straight up lying. Except we think it’s “good” because we value the status quo over self-expression. We think it’s easier to hide because we put other’s comfort over our own. Those little moments where we feign agreeableness add up. Drip….drip,drip. The guilt and repression corrode our non-reactive headspace until we’re blowing up at some small thing or taking it out on ourselves.
Expression happens either way. Feelings get expressed one way or another. We can hide how we’re feeling in the moment, and that might make things more comfortable for now. But they get expressed in the reaffirming of the belief that we have to hide parts of ourselves in service of the greater comfort. That uncomfortable “bad”, “sad”, “mad” stuff you’re covering up is being expressed in the form of further isolating those parts of your psyche. AND in reinforcing your belief that those things best not be shone the light of day, because they’re not “normal” or “desirable”.
Somewhere along the way we started the process of removing things from the “human” category and putting them into the “other” category. We could also call these categories “pleasurable” and “painful”. Somehow all the things we consider pleasurable wound up in the human category and all the things we consider painful wound up in the other category. Hmmm funny how that happens.
So when we go through a painful experience, what happens is, we know it should get moved over into the human category, because, #1, it happened, and, #2, you’re human. But it might not get all the way there because we’ve gotten very habitual about putting something that felt similar in the “other” category. Our expectations for how our life is supposed to go, or supposed to feel, do a really good job of denying the full spectrum of humanity. When we are able to fully move it over from the “other” category into the “human” category we accept that our life, is, shockingly, not perfect.
Everything, EVERYTHING, we could possibly experience falls under the category of being human. There isn’t actually an “other” box, we’ve just been conditioned to think there is.
There’s a concept in physics known as complementarity. A famous physicist, Niels Bohr, is quoted as saying, “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is usually another profound truth.” An example of this in physics is observing light. Sometimes light acts as a particle and sometimes it acts as a wave. Complementarity is wayyyy more complex and I might be butchering this application. But basically it says that you can’t observe light as both a particle and a wave at the same time. However, its waveness does not prove its particleness false. In fact, it proves it to be true. Because it exists as a wave it can also exist as a particle. And vice versa.
Happiness does not cancel out suffering. And suffering does not cancel out happiness. The existence of one confirms the existence of the other. They both exist, just under different circumstances. Being happy is profoundly human, right? We put that in our human category? Because we identify things like joy, good humor and being at peace as being human, it means that we must also accept things like sorrow, grief, anger and anxiety as being human. The opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
My whole point with this long winding explanation is to get you to put down the damned perfection. And realize that you are oh so very human. You’re not perfect, nor do you have to be. So cut yourself some slack. Don’t handle things well. Don’t worry about learning a lesson. Or drawing a silver lining. Or being positive. Take it easy on yourself. Be gentle with the parts of yourself you want to hide. Feel how you feel. You don’t have to hide your humanness.
We don’t grow over our pain, we grow around it. We don’t grow past our pain, we grow toward it. We don’t move on from our pain, we move through it. We don’t leave our pain behind, we take it with us.
Through expressing our pain, our suffering, our heartache we become capable of holding the deepest abysses known to man, each other. These perfect expressions of humanity are signals, not to be overcome and bulldozed through so you can get back to your life. But to be felt and tended to with care, gentleness and compassion. If we can nurture the tenderness of our imperfect human lives and begin to zoom out from the suffocating linearity we think of as growth, we realize that every flavor of life has something for us .
Learning to experience every flavor of life doesn’t mean that we’re better off for it. Learning to live with the pain doesn’t mean it all works out in the end. But it allows us to see that we too are the invaluable, no part more worthy than the next. That the true value of life’s experiences is found not just in their lessons, but in knowing we are always of it. And know that love is not just there when we get better, it is always there, if only we become it.