Our desire to share pain as a bonding experience is baffling.
Our communal agreement in the awfulness is itself awful.
And yet I am grateful for people who will let me explain my pain; for those who will commiserate and agree.
Tag: suffering
- Theme: Self
Fighting yourself
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1–2 minutesWe stay in opposition to ourselves.
We deny or fight our sadness or depression, rejecting that burdensome tightness within us.
By befriending it, by holding your darkness’s hand and openly loving it, you diffuse the fight and can begin to alleviate the pain. - Theme: Growth
Don’t look directly at Medusa
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1–2 minutesThere are parts of our life upon which we cannot gaze. To do so would destroy our life.
In such cases, you can feel the malevolence but only glimpse the grotesque through the mirror.The most common solution? Don’t look in the mirror.
- Theme: Self
the hook of pain
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1–2 minutesWhen a troubling event keeps bobbing to the surface, your subconscious tells you something is unresolved: a lesson needs to be learned.
Often the event involves pain (being hurt or hurting). Caught on this hook, unwilling to let go, we have pierced ourselves and the other together in self-traumatizing rumination.The problem with releasing the barb is we must approach and experience the pain without shying away. We must remain open-hearted to grieving and forgiving, allowing us to process the memory, remove the barb, and let the wound scar.
Otherwise, we risk pushing the pain under only to have it continually bob back to the surface, wounding us repeatedly.
- Theme: Self
Clever you causing pain
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1–2 minutesYour clever flippancy is callous: check your heart before you open your throat or let your fingers fly.
Always engage sympathy first; always feel before you say. - Theme: Self
Procrastination is pleasure in pain
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1–2 minutesWhile we can easily break our day into chunks to manage it, the procrastinator requires more pain to invoke discipline.
They trade the current moment as stolen joy from a future burden, eventually pinned under the stress and anxiety of "too late."
Procrastinating seems akin to the thrill of gambling: risking loss as a means to generate excitement and challenge, and of course, the commensurate charge if you "pull it off." - Theme: Self
If it can happen, it will
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1–2 minutesYet, a repeated negative (seemingly out of your control) continually assails you, and you try to grow from it, but the grit of the stoics has not yet manifested as resilience.
As an intermediate phase, you can riff away from the negativity of Murphy’s law "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" and into "If it can happen, it will."
This seeming pessimism is the reverse: focusing on all events allows a burst of glee when the good thing happens, a resigned affirmation when it doesn’t, but a more realistic and probabilistic view of how balanced your life is. - Theme: Self
Courage born from pain
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1–2 minutesIt takes pain over time to become courageous. Mostly we don’t want to change; we want relief.Yet, there is a threshold of despair from which cowardice costs too much.
The goal is to reduce the time it takes to react until you are spontaneous: you courageously avoid long-term pain and temporary relief. - Theme: Self
help hurts
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1–2 minutesThe paradox of looking to others for help is that it creates hurt.
Just as you must decide to help and change yourself, you must choose not to hurt yourself.
Either way, getting hurt or looking for help comes from giving your responsibility to others. - Theme: Self
Causing pain by existing
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1–2 minutesIs it possible to exist in the world without touching another in a way that causes pain? Consider the environment and relationships: Is our passage marked by waves of harm, the price of living? Or is harm a symbiosis by which both parties confirm their existence?
Put another way, can you sit still, or do you work to escape the beating of your heart?