It’s a premise all too prevalent across media and literature, the need to hurt in order to heal. Think Sylvia Plath’s “We grow, it hurts at first”, from Taylor Swift’s Cardigan “If you never bleed you’re never gonna grow“, and Social Media’s fixation on facing a “Canon Event”. In an epoch of digital wellness, where clean eating content is vaguely orthorexic, and self-care becomes a curated image of a detox juice, and DFYNE set, it’s no surprise that narratives on wellbeing and self-help can become twisted.
To the human psyche, emotional pain is transformative; in a biological sense, it physically alters neural pathways and cognitive development. It’s also an unavoidable characteristic of human existence, but this newfound pressure to make it productive means we glorify those who can mould their suffering into a marketable trait or a charitable endeavour, forgetting what happens when what doesn’t kill you actually doesn’t make you stronger. It’s the go-to comfort phrase to those who’ve been through trauma, but what if taking a pilates class and journaling in a Moleskine only channels your pain into something curated and costly, leaving you angry, grief-stricken, and weak at the knees?
Undeniably, emotional adversity involves healthy challenges of taking risks and working hard; it’s difficult, but not explicitly bad for you. Only when it becomes unbalanced and obsessive, which seems to be social media’s specialty, does it become problematic. Especially by crafting pain as a prerequisite to growth, we create a warped and even quite damaging mindset that makes self-improvement eerily resemble self-punishment, where pain becomes a purpose, a cornerstone to identity.
The narrative that we need to earn happiness by going through the trenches first is drilled into us on all fronts by the media and culture. In English class, young teenagers are taught about the narrative arc and the prerequisite of conflict to make a captivating story. It’s found in the plots of every legend or tale, from childhood bedtime stories to Hollywood sagas. The main character overcomes adversity and then lives happily ever after (or until producers realise they can profit from a sequel). So it’s really no great shock that we tend to look for some deep struggle that can enlighten us, purify us, and make us whole, like all our favourite characters and role models. For teenage me, this was the woes of heartbreak. When I was 14 years old, I looked forward to the feeling of a broken heart from a high school boyfriend. I wanted to sob into a bowl of ice cream and scream break-up songs out the car window as they did in the movies. I felt excluded when I couldn’t relate to all my favourite songs, the feeling of understanding the message woven in the lyrics, but never resonating. Coincidentally, this was exactly when Drivers License by Olivia Rodrigo had just been released and was taking the world of every teenage girl by storm. Surprisingly, life isn’t like the movies, and when it actually happened to me at 16, it wasn’t cinematic or uplifting. It was raw and it was earth shattering, for the first time I knew what it felt like to have my bones hum with grief.
Dear reader, your pain isn’t the most interesting thing about you. It is not your purpose, and your peace does not have to be earned. Existing without suffering is not a crime. This fixation on emotional struggle and criticism of contentment is something that French philosopher Albert Camus reprimands in an interview with Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (1959). He tells us, in translation, that “Today happiness is like a crime—never admit it. Don’t say ‘I’m happy’ otherwise you will hear condemnation all around.” Instead of atoning for your very existence and shouldering the omnipresence of human suffering, we could borrow a sentiment from Mary Oliver in her famous poem Wild Geese. She writes, “You do not have to be good./ You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.” In a culture that pressures every moment to be utilised to its maximum capacity and productivity, a deeply ingrained trait in which capitalism seeps through our social fabric and narratives of human purpose, it’s important to remember that we don’t have to compensate for simply being and taking up space. If we just take a second to think about why we would be sold that narrative, and who benefits from the principles pushed to us that tell us to work to the bone for fulfillment and hardship as motivation. It’s certainly not the well-being of the individual.
And so what if we could tell ourselves a different story? Instead of it being shameful or self-deserving, we could recognise that pain unites every human being on this earth across space and time. After all, each of us lives an existence of unique shades and escapades, but at its core, every mother feels the pain of childbirth, and we all come into this world crying in the cold air. This is well illustrated in the poem Tortures by Wizwala Szymborshka, where, the Nobel Prize awarded poet writes that “The body still trembles as it trembled/ before Rome was founded and after,” recognising that our reaction and sensation to truly visceral and even animalistic pain is a constant consistence of the human experience, explaining that despite our modern developments and constant restructuring of the human race, the body remains “..a reservoir of pain.” Her words explicitly refer to physical pain, but the sentiment can broaden to the realm of emotional hardship too. In this way, perhaps we can let the human in us recognise the human others, acknowledging that we all have things we want to curl up into a ball and cry about, so why not be kinder to one another, offering sweet relief in a world that can be so unendingly terrifying and tumultuous.
So instead of seeing pain as something necessary to be goaded over and rebuilt from, incessantly and relentlessly, perhaps we can shift to a softer, more binding perspective. We may instead recognise the body as a reservoir of pain; it does not have to be the blueprint. Dear reader, I promise you can’t destroy yourself to become something better.