Pain Robs Us Of Life

My entire life was consumed with fear. The police were always around, responding to reports of drug dealing, drug abuse and violence. The children in the neighborhood bore the brunt of this traumatic dynamic. Since I attended one of the roughest high schools in the country at the time, I couldn’t seek refuge at school. It was common to see fights between boys and girls and to see teachers getting hurt in the process. I was scared to walk home from school because students faced extreme bullying, including physical and emotional abuse. To protect myself, I would run most of the way home. While I also had my share of good times growing up, these things do take a toll on you. I had no comfort, and my parents were too caught up in their pain to notice how much they hurt me. Emotional nurturing did not exist in my world. My relationship with my mother was difficult. She was very controlling and often spoke for me, or over me when I was younger.

Don't Stop Believing

I remember one particular day where I sat in the shower, wet, crying from utter despair and powerlessness. Many times afterwards I thought of ending it, but something always pulled me back and kept me going. Today, I am grateful that I was able to keep going. I am grateful that whatever saw me through back then didn’t give up on me. And although I am healed, I still remember what it feels like to believe you are not good enough and not smart enough. I still remember what it feels like to believe you are not enough. I know the trauma of not having enough to eat and never receiving the emotional nurturing one needs to survive. For those of us who have been abused by the people who were supposed to love us, this can seem almost impossible. So, why not embrace it with all your heart? In many human cultures, we love to glamorize pain. My pain made me stronger, we often hear people say. It made me who I am today, others chime in. And while pain has served to motivate many people in life, the stories of numerous people for whom pain was just a lifelong thorn and setback are more than often not told.

Little Fictions

I like to think of pain as a tyrannical personal trainer. For those people who thrive and are motivated under extreme environments, a tyrannical personal trainer is a good fit. When it screams at you to keep going and calls you names, you are motivated to step up and keep going. You believe that life will never get you down, so you spend your energy proving to life and yourself that you will overcome! For others, pain’s tyrannical force only causes us to push ourselves too hard and we break our bones. We tear our tendons and our muscles, and we find that we cannot go on. Our personal trainer yells at us and calls us worthless, but we cannot train on a broken ankle, no matter how motivated we may feel. So we sink to the mud as we hear how much we are a disappointment and a failure for not letting our pain motivate us to higher heights of glory. No matter who you are, there will come a time in your life when you will ask, Why? Why did this happen to me? You may wonder whether you did anything to deserve it. Sometimes, you fully believe that perhaps there is something so utterly wrong with who you are at your core that made you deserve your abuse. Pain has a tendency to make us believe in our own unworthiness. It is so traumatic that we cannot forget it. It is so traumatic that it forces us to concentrate on it constantly, seeking refuge, but unable to find any away from the cause of our despair.

The Worst You Can Do

Pain is a signal to your brain that something is wrong. It is a warning that whatever stimuli present in your environment is severely bad for you. So, when your mother calls you derogatory names, you feel just as bad as if someone hurt you physically. If my mother calls me names every day of my life, I may understand the scientific reason why it hurts, but it still doesn’t help me to understand why she does it. I am still confused why I have to feel pain in the first place if it doesn’t really serve any real purpose. Even for those people who say that pain made them stronger, there are still other less painful ways to become stronger in this life. The problem of pain, at its root, is the question of why. Many of us cannot let go of our pain simply because we cannot accept it. This is a perfectly natural human reaction. We understand that there is something instinctively wrong with pain. Eating, dancing, laughing and exercising feel right because they are right. They nourish, repair and build our bodies and souls. Pain, on the other hand, destroys our bodies and souls. It leaves us with nothing but shadows of our former selves, so we understand that it is wrong. If pain is so wrong, why would it then happen to us? If it is so wrong, why did it happen to us in particular? There must be a reason why, otherwise that leaves us with the idea that the deepest, darkest days of our lives were pointless. We did not have to suffer that pain because it had no purpose. It was just something that happened that managed to almost destroy us completely. How utterly meaningless! Eating is not meaningless because it gives us energy and nourishment to stay alive and take care of our loved ones and our environment. Pain robs us of life and causes us tremendous trauma in the process. It is a thief that delights in ruining us for no other reason than because it can.