Quit Moaning, We're All Hurting
Let’s be honest: everyone experiences pain. For some of us, that pain comes and goes more fluidly than for others. Sometimes it’s emotional pain or the pain of regret. Others experience excruciating daily physical pain. And still for everyone, the fact remains: you often don’t remember with crystal clarity the pain you’re no longer living in.
Being compassionate with people who have non-chronic pain has been one of the hardest things for me to land on. For years I have wanted to say (and have often said) things like, “I’m not going to feel sorry for you because the difference between you and I is that tomorrow you’ll wake up without the pain”, when people around me complain of their hangnail, and, “Age doesn’t buy you the exclusive right to pain” when people my senior tell me that I’m too young to be in pain.
While these experiences, these interactions and situations I find myself in are 100% true and real, I have learned to combat this giant oversight with a swooping swing of the bat filled with empathy and understanding.
Pain sucks. It doesn’t matter if you have a toothache, a headache, a toe ache or the flu, pain for any amount of time just sucks. Everyone owns their own right to experience pain the way they do - the way they need to. The truth of the matter is that when we “swipe our pain aside” to reach into someone else’s soul and commune with them wherever they are - right there at the spot that they got stuck - where their pain is, we open up the doors to connection and relationship in a meaningful way. As true as my snarky remarks have been, they have also been a coping mechanism for me to push people away.
It hurts to not be understood by other people. It hurts when people don’t want to understand, or better yet, when they act like they’re interested but ultimately don’t care. But I realized that if I don’t learn a new response to people who unintentionally or intentionally say or do hurtful things, I was only going to multiply the ache by responding in a way bereft of kindness. Give people the benefit of the doubt that they just may be going through something harder and more intense than you could possibly imagine, and they are also just trying to cope.
Bend over backwards to try and understand people before expecting them to understand you. I believe your life will be better off for it, and at the very least you may just leave them with a neutral or positive taste in their mouth rather than a negative one.
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