Suffering Olympics
A different perspective on perspective
One day I was having a conversation with a dear friend I’ve known since I was fourteen. I’m not sure how we got to the topic, but we began discussing spoons, as in, Spoon Theory, set forth by Christine Miserandino as a way for folks living with chronic illness to explain the limits of their energy on a day-to-day basis. I had just talked about having limited spoons, and in the next breath, I added a caveat of not being a Spoonie — the term adopted by people in communities that Spoon Theory can apply to.
My friend raised an eyebrow, “What do you mean, you’re not a Spoonie?”
I launched into my spiel about not wanting to co-opt a term from a community to which I didn’t belong, but he only challenged me on this further. He asked me to explain, as someone who is hyper-mobile and has a history of mental illness, how I didn’t belong to such a community? I felt myself go flush as I realised I had just participated in the Suffering Olympics. I had just de-legitimised my experience because of my perception that others have it worse than me. That their suffering somehow negated my own.
This probably sounds familiar to some of you. I have encountered this dismissive attitude in others as often as I have in myself. I’ll meet someone living with chronic pain who downplays the challenges of their day-to-day because ‘at least I’m not living in a refugee camp or something’, or someone with an auto-immune disorder which has been nearly impossible to diagnose and therefore impossible to consistently treat, who claims it’s not that bad because ‘it’s not something terminal’.
This approach makes sense, though. On one level, we see that what we are trying to do is maintain a sense of perspective. We don’t want our personal difficulties to be made bigger than they are, or to feel a sense of hopelessness, or come across as self-pitying. We don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking our suffering makes us special. We know that suffering is a fact of life, an inevitable part of living in an interconnected world, and we understand that suffering is relative.
But is it really?
Absolutely, suffering happens and compared across the breadth of human suffering, there are forms we can say are definitely worse. But ranking suffering does not change the fact that suffering is hard. What is hard for me might not be hard for someone else, and yet we have this knee jerk response to dismiss our suffering because we don’t think it’s ‘bad enough’. We think: Oh, that person over there is in a lot more pain than I am over here. If we swapped places, they would think what I’m going through is nothing. This isn’t really that bad.
This is important to consider because it’s not that having perspective is a problem. Perspective can help us see when we are really just uncomfortable or annoyed — like being stuck in traffic, or the grocery store not having the brand of Soy milk we like — and not suffering at all, really. But this kind of perspective should not be applied when we are legitimately going through something that is hard. Suffering may be relative, but it is not about where we fit in a hierarchy. Viewing suffering in terms of hierarchy, rather than relative to our different embodiments and experiences, means we can become dismissive of the suffering of others as much as we are dismissive of our own challenges and heartaches.
Dismissing our suffering because we think others have it worse denies us the possibility of learning from the challenges of life. For example, I have known two people living with chronic pain. One person I knew minimised it, convincing themselves that it was an imposition to talk about the impact it had on them. They push people away, are extremely abrasive, and hard to be around—even abusive to others. The other person is incredibly compassionate — one of the most open and loving people I know — and attributes their ability to empathize with others to their ability to relate to their pain.
We owe it to ourselves, and everyone around us, to acknowledge when things are hard, not so we can wallow, but so we can learn how to show up for it. When I admit that sometimes, I only have a few spoons, I’m cultivating awareness of the physical and mental needs and capacities of others. When I recognise that yes, I am definitely depressed, I am able to see that depression is a healthy response to the current political and environmental state of the world, and I make time to check in on friends to see how they are managing. When I see how gatekeeping keeps me, as a woman and someone without a college education, from being in positions of leadership, I am able to see who else is being excluded and how I can hold the gate open when I’ve managed to find a way in.
Our experience of suffering is different, but not a single human being wakes up in the morning and decides that they want to win the Suffering Olympics — or not consciously anyway. We can pause and ask ourselves what is being served when we rank suffering? This ranking of worth is given to us by capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist systems — systems we do not have to accept or perpetuate.
When we ask ourselves what serves, and we know our orientation is towards our collective liberation, we see that acknowledging our suffering is an essential step for alleviating all suffering. It enables us to see the broader context of systems that perpetuate harm and how we can learn to respond both personally and collectively. The perspective we gain is that all forms of suffering deserve to be addressed, and the best place to start is right here, with ourselves.
Visit www.KaitlynSCHatch.com to see more of my work in the world, including the podcast Everything is Workable, a collection of my artwork, and the books I’ve written.
