pain doesn't make us special
listen up, snowflake
the fear, of course, is that i am a wimp.
(how much can i take before i reach for the codeine?)
so when i pass out from pain, the darkening of tunnel vision comes as a relief. a sicko’s verification. some proof (i always want cold hard proof) that the experience is, in fact, pretty bad.
in short: i don’t trust my own pain.
last week, i visited “pain scale,” an exhibit by artist carolyn lazard.
as you enter, you pass six brown faces, all smiling like the most sanguine symbol on a rudimentary pain scale. then you walk down a long hallway into a dark room, where you watch a giant projection of what looks like a red strobe light. in actuality, this is a camera filming right up close to the artist’s skin.
the work is informed by lazard’s experience with chronic illness, examining how routinely “pain scales” fail women of color. (in clinical settings, the pain of women of color is underestimated by over three points on a 0-10 scale.) it shows how the act of translating a sensation into numbers will always fail.
the effect is strangely destabilizing. it’s a reminder that this is how we look at people: from the outside in. an incoherent and incomplete attempt to understand what’s inside.
when i’m trying to understand my own inner experience (literally every month), i watch the fleabag pain scene.
i rewatch that kristen stewart interview when she says that if you’re not embodied, then you’re “hiding your period blood and not cumming well.”
i try to remember there is freedom in feeling without shame. i cancel plans. i tunnel vision. i crash.
at first, yes, of course there’s a sense of relief. i turn my own pain into pearls.
but if i honor the story of my feelings, what am i then free to do? just lay on the couch, moaning and feeling rather sorry for myself?
at some point, self-validation slips into self-absorption.
and wallowing in my own pain doesn’t feel particularly liberatory anymore.
lately, i’ve been doing these meditations for chronic pain. whenever i feel it, i am supposed to exhale.
i unlink sensation from my interpretation of it. i don’t make it part of me. i stop telling myself it feels bad. i just feel it.
when i do, quickly, the world begins to spin. air seems to rush past my ears and i feel straight up high. my body trips like i’m on psychedelics.
when i feel pain without calling it pain, my mind becomes strange. the pain is less like pain and more like the primal scream of life itself, using every body to make itself heard.
it roars through me and i feel without words. i feel a history of men in battlefields before anesthesia, women in childbirth before hospitals, tooth pulls, and lion attacks, and cancer in the bones. i feel heartache and separation and i feel how utterly banal my own pain is—and how so many people have been denied the basic decency of having their own pain recognized.
when i meditate and stop telling myself that i am in pain, just keep breathing out and succumb to the sensation as if it were drugs, i feel how pain is what we all have in common.
i feel how my pain doesn’t make me special; in fact, just the opposite. pain is what connects me to other people.
as one of those deeply annoying highly sensitive people (clinically diagnosed! yay!), i often, well, spiral. i cry at commercials. i cry in art museums. i literally cried at the sunset yesterday. and i do this shit when i’m alone, so it’s not like i’m putting on a Not Like Other Girls act.
but when i meditate, i feel how there isn’t anything special in my own sensitivity; just because i feel things more often than others does not mean that others do not reach my same depths.
i have to remind myself of this often. whenever i’m in a fight with my boyfriend, i can (very) quickly convince myself that he’s completely unfeeling. with one sickening looping thought, i start to believe he’s withholding or ignoring me or even lying about loving me. in other words: whenever i’m afraid, i convince myself that other people don’t feel pain. at least not the way i do.
when we make pain exceptional—believing that only us or people like us feel it—we become capable of inflicting immense cruelty.
we see this in our own cultural biases: period pain is often belittled, but so is the emotional pain of men. and i mean, descartes performed live vivisections on animals, literally nailing dogs to wooden boards and cutting them open, because he believed that only humans could feel pain.
when we believe that pain makes us exceptional, we lose the thing that binds us.
every time we’re in pain, we are brought to the limits of language. this is not some destabilizing mystical experience, but something that brings us closer to the reality of the world.
though it often feels like separation, pain does not render me an individual.
perhaps precisely because pain isolates me from everything i know, it connects me to everything i don’t.
liked this? there’s more! to read my theory of pain as translation, click here!
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