“I somehow don’t feel like I’m allowed to be hurt by that experience. There are people down there still living in tents and at least making a little bit of art- and they somehow deal with it. Don’t they?”

It’s not my place to tell other people what to think or how to carry themselves, so I’m going to go ahead and do it. What I have to say is in large part about certain social conventions and how useless – even damaging – they are. Might as well start off by being presumptuous.

I don’t know why, but there’s enormous pressure – at least in the states (and elsewhere, of course – I’m only going to speak generally about our peoples, though) – to shut, face forward, work, and enjoy it.

If you complain or feel bad about anything, then you’re a loser.

If you complain or feel bad about anything, then someone will bring up starving kids in [insert poor country here].

We deny ourselves the right to acknowledge our pain. And, as with everything else ‘Merican, we compare Our Stuff to Their Stuff. The Johnsons have a new car, and the Smiths have more pain.

What you’re doing with your statement above is to:

1. Compare Your Stuff – you see some other people as having it tougher, yet making it. You’re tempted to wave away whatever you feel because you think, despite what was a difficult time for you and one you still haven’t gotten over, that you don’t have a right to feel badly.

2. Hang on to Your Stuff *and* get some New Really Bad Stuff – there’s some guilt in what you’re expressing. Now, not only do you still have this pain you’re carrying around, but you also feel guilty about it. Does that seem right?

3. Raise the bar for Pain – there’s a strong ‘Merican tendency to push and push and push, pretending to ignore pain, or dealing with it in a non-productive way. I consider the addition of guilt to be non-productive in the extreme. When you raise the bar for pain, you’re trying to set an artificial threshold that marks the point at which you feel it’s acceptable to acknowledge your pain as legitimate, but you’ll never get there because, each time you hurt below that threshold, the threshold will be reset so that it’s relative to the amount of pain you’re feeling. I swear this makes sense.

*Nobody* gets to decide for you what hurts and what doesn’t. You might think you’re making the choice yourself, but without those other people around, would you still think your pain was unworthy?

My dad fancies himself an anarchist. One day, we were standing at a crosswalk when I suggested we jaywalk to support his anarchistic way of life. He refused – he said we’d wait for the crosswalk light to let us across. I was confused. He told me that, were he to cross when he wasn’t supposed to, he’d be acknowledging that the crosswalk light still controlled him. If you’re defying something, it’s still controlling you. He chose the safe route instead – might as well accept a lose-lose situation in the safest way possible.

I wouldn’t have thought to have looked at it this way. When you compare your pain to others’, it might seem like you’re doing all the thinking, but, like the crosswalk that tells you to stay put, you’re being controlled in a subtle way. It’s especially bad because it’s harder to see that you’re being affected. If you *know* that you’re being shaped in part by this outside force, you can at lest determine whether or not you think it’s Right.

So, as I asked earlier, if those other people weren’t there, would you question your right to feel your pain?

It’s *your* pain. It hurts. That’s totally obvious. You don’t need permission to feel it. You just do. And if you do, then you do, and it doesn’t matter what your skepticism toward your right to feel it suggests.

If you were in a room with someone who’d just cut his arm off, and if you’d just cut your finger off, would your hand stop hurting just because you got off “easy”? Would you question your right to feel bad about having lost nothing but a little ol’ finger? I doubt it.

Plus, to complicate things further, everybody has a different threshold for pain. When you compare yourself to a group, it might appear to you that they’re all maintaining, but each one is in a different state of unhappiness (or happiness as it may be). Imagine trying to navigate by a compass when true north is wavering back and forth over a wide spectrum. You’d have quite the difficult time getting to your destination. Navigating emotions by using the experiences and constitutions of other people is no different, except that I’d rather be lost in the woods than in my head. I’ve had enough of the latter.

Guilt is an enormous problem on its own. My shrink used to tell me that it’s a useless emotion. I’d argue with her. She’d argue back. In retrospect, she was absolutely right. I held myself to unrealistic standards. When I didn’t maintain those standards, I felt unworthy, beat myself up, and, on top of having fallen short of my goals, I punished myself. You’re already down – you don’t need to be further beaten.

She taught me to acknowledge guilt, but then let it go. There’s nothing it can do for you. If you recognize that you can atone for what you’re done, then it’s useful for a time, but it does not otherwise solve any problems. It breaks morale.

Which option seems more natural? Feeling your pain or denying it?

For the former, it’s just there. You don’t have to try to feel it – you simply hurt.

For the latter, you’ve had to build supporting scaffolding. It takes effort to question your right to the pain, whereas feeling it is something you’ll do automatically.

In the end, from a practical standpoint, none of this matters. What matters is that you hurt. It comes from a part of the brain that doesn’t deal with intellect. You can push and push until it’s well hidden, but it’s still there.

It’s like a bill you’ve left unpaid for months. It doesn’t go away. It sits there, waiting to be dealt with, and every time you see it, it sends a shiver of stress through your body. Eventually, someone’s going to come to collect. You’ll have the choice to ignore it, but to do so would be another form of stress, as you’ll get a little black mark on your credit report. It’ll sit there for a few years until the rest of the planet is ready to forgive you. Then you’ll finally be able to forget it.

I think you should just feel the pain. Observe it – check it out from a few different angles. See if you can isolate it for clarity. Turn it into a sphere or a dodecahedron or whatever makes you happy, but don’t let it stick its little claws into everything. See it, name it, describe it, allow it in, and then let it take its natural course.

But don’t wallow in it. Recognize whenever you’re taking it beyond itself. If it’s a brain chemical thing, then accept that, until you stabilize, there’s probably nothing you can really do (I’ve had to get used to this one). If it’s a thought, then you can deal with it.

Your pain is your own. It doesn’t matter how many kids are starving in Africa. We have it tough in our own ways. The stress to succeed, meet our lofty goals, and deal with the everyday clusterfuck that is living in the Modern World is something that can break you bit by bit. You don’t need to make it worse.

Keep plugging away, you will be okay.
But seriously folks, being sold a bill of goods that was (is) so obviously (now) misrepresented is not a unique experience.

This is life: It becomes part of your character & contributes to your overall being.

We are all glad your back.