The importance of pain
Pain is something we’ve all had to deal with in some form. Everyone has gone through something that we can’t even imagine or we could possibly relate to. But that’s what it means to be human. So impossibly vulnerable to the point where we strive to make ourselves anything but. We try to cut off feeling to stop feeling.
We try to stop our emotions because we think it will make us immune to pain. But what does that make you? Would you rather be a stone for the rest of your life? Never letting anything touch you because you’ve been hurt too many times before? Bottling everything up because you think that’s the only route to peace. But if you weren’t hurt, how could you possibly learn from your mistakes? To better yourself? To understand yourself more? How can you learn how to treat people with kindness and patience?
When we avoid undesirable emotions, we end up losing out on all the enlivening ones too. Hurt is an inevitable avenue we must all drive down. It’s the bridge that leads us to understanding and compassion. To empathy and love. To strength and wisdom.
“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”
-Lord Alfred Tennyson.
I didn’t used to understand this quote. I used to snort in derision and turn my nose up at it because I couldn’t imagine how never having loved at all would be better than love lost. I would have much rather not loved at all because it would have spared me the experience of all the anguish and sadness that accompanies heartbreak. Not to have cried my eyes out and feel like my heart was exploding into smithereens right in my chest. But as I grew older and a wee bit more wiser I finally understood the meaning behind the quote.
It isn’t talking about just love, its about emotion. Closing yourself off from emotion means you never grow as a person, you never learn how to handle situations differently or how to be emotionally intelligent.
Tell the truth. Express your feelings. Ride the emotional rollercoaster that is life. It should be that simple. But putting aside your emotions and thinking it’s better to live closed off because you’ll be less likely to experience pain and hurt is a shitty way to live. It is a short term fix to get yourself to heal but it should never be a permanent solution. Holding everything is a time bomb. It gives you a false sense of emotional security. If you put a lid on a boiling pot, eventually the contents will rise to the top and spill over. Human emotions are no different. If we push our feelings, our pain down and try to avoid them, eventually, they will explode out more fiercely than before, wrecking havoc on everything in our life.
We are not made of rock, we are not inanimate objects, we are a living, breathing miracle of life that’s walking this earth and should experience the full range of emotions that comes with it. If we were not meant to feel, we would not possess the ability to. We were created this way to do precisely that. So don’t squander your life living closed off in fear, because that’s what it is. Suppressing emotion is nothing more than cowardice.
Pain can be awakening. Grief, sorrow, sadness are all emotions that have a way of grasping our attention, making us more acute and aware of ourselves. Pain demands to be felt and it demands us to tune in to what is going on inside of us. Emotional pain is sobering, it makes us pay attention inward whether we like it or not. Now, I’m not professing to be a sadist or a masochist, far from it, instead what I am highlighting is that pain is useful.
You want to stop getting hurt or being in pain permanently, you’re going to stop living. Hide in a cave, live in a desert or a remote island away from civilisation. Trust me, when the loneliness starts to creep in and fester, you will drive yourself insane and you will basically sign your own death sentence. Or you might draw a face on a volleyball and name it Wilson and he will be your friend (if you don’t understand this reference, we cannot be friends).
Pain makes you reflect, reflection opens the door to awareness and awareness leads to reinvention and rejuvenation.
I hope that you fall in love and it hurts so bad.
The only way you can know is to give it all you have.
I hope that you don’t suffer but take the pain.
I hope when the moment comes you say
I DID IT ALL.
This is a song verse from ‘I lived’ by One Republic and it has resonated so much with me that I blast it on full volume when i’m hurting. It reminds me this pain is just part of another phase, a new experience that filled a chapter in my life. Sometimes a lesson learnt the hard way is a lesson better learnt.
Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. I wasn’t ready for half the shit I went through but I got through it anyway and you will too, we were built for it. Choosing to face your pain doesn’t make you weak, it never has. Take control of your pain and use it as a necessary lesson for your own personal evolution.
Get right up in pain’s face. Acknowledge it, embrace it, tell it to give you its best shot, feel it to it’s full extent- to its deepest, darkest recesses; cry, scream until your throat hurts, punch something, break something if you have to. But FEEL IT. Let it swallow you for a moment. You will be in agony. You will feel as if you have entered an inescapable abyss and you will think its unbearable but you must endure. Allow yourself to sink into the depths of pain so that you can stop being afraid of what you will find. So that you can reach the bottom, then use it to push yourself up and rise. Turn the pain into power and ascend from the deep. You will emerge stronger than before, capable of much more because you conquered your own pain. Once you have done that, there is nothing you cannot handle.
One of the hardest parts about coming out of a dark place is the level of suspicion felt when light begins to enter our life again and the way it’s so difficult to let go of the idea that it will all be taken away long enough to enjoy something good. But it won’t last if you don’t let it. You’ve already done the most agonising part. This too shall pass.
You will not find a strong, compassionate person without a painful past. No one reaches that stage of rationality and emotional maturity without having borne immense pain.
“If you feel you’re in a dark place, you’ve not fallen. You’ve been planted.’
