Pain is Relative
I claw my fingers past my (already) receding hairline from years of intense head band appliqué, the tornado of tormenting overanalytics wrecks the seemingly peaceful coexistence of sanity and crazy thoughts in your head. I scrunch up my eyes into the slits I wished to see on my thighs and wrists. Instead of Crimson, I feel the transparent glass icicles graze past all my pores.
It is hot, as if your tear ducts are the taps for hot water for a calming shower to help wash away your cold neglect and uncertainty.
Deep inside you are bursting with indescribable pain and struggle. You're used to this negative cloud, you're used to hearing far more disasterous tales from the mouths of the soldiers you've encountered in life. The automatic social comparison theory is activated and whether you like it or not, I feel that the clockwork of rumination gets set in motion. The gears interlock and each click of the clock is amplified with every example they throw out. You immediately perceive them as worse than yours and
discount the very legitimacy and severity of your own plight
The voices kick in:
"your problems are nothing. Look everyone else has it worse. What gives me the right to actually feel sorry for myself and hope that people help a soul who is just hypersensitive and exaggerating her imagined struggle."
Sadly, I believe that many of us who have been engrossed in severe self critique and doubt, harnessed with flimsy insecurity - we can't break out of this vicious thought cycle. I was 7 when I already started to exercise self doubt - being traumatised by being sent to the discipline master's office for lying - I couldn't trust myself anymore, I must be lying all the time, even when I think it is the truth.
Well, I feel that most of us are begging for that assurance and validation when we go through pain. I know it isin't supposedly right that people just rant with me and trash the people or events that caused me pain. I don't think you need to feel guilty (as I am trying to train myself to be) Coz this is much akin to regular annoyances in life. When a teacher chews you out or a friend betrays you, you want nothing more but to gossip and rally together people to get on your side to enhance your self justification that people are robbing you of. I think it's a normal self-defense coping mechanism - we want people to say we are right - we want the reminder that others are in the wrong and we are the victims of the situation ultimately.
I know not everyone is like that, but that's just the I at I perceive things and how I would think - it's probably worth criticism but I'm just going to say it.
You start to shore up your defences with your recurrent waves of examples to argue your innocence. You almost tend to be biased and just highlight the wrong things that the party has done to you, you have the tendency to leave out or talk briefly about your contribution to the problem because you are desperately trying to paint them in a far worse light to get people on your side. I suppose this is normal ?
You hear so many times "pain is relative" and that everyone has different pain tolerances. Idk about y'all but for me this doesn't help. For me it makes me feel weaker Coz I have a weaker pain capacity to withstand the hard stuff I life - I simply dwarf in comparison as my problems seem like trivial crossword difficulties in the grand scheme of things serious like physical abuse. Yes, pain is relative. But I think what is better to remind people in this situation:
It is perfectly normal, that you would feel equally or not more shattered then they are now.
no one can judge coz they don't know the whole history of your life.
Sure other peoples' problems seem pertinently more irreparable than yours. You compare - you have (perceived) verbal abuse but another had concrete proof of physical abuse. Without empirical proof, you assume without asking that society is judging you for being bratty and ungrateful for being in a climate of no outright violence and exploitation.
Many times, almost every other time, I pray that instead of the the profanities and condescending statements hurled at me - that it would be a cold hard slap or beating that I can document as the socially alarming signs of pain and injustice.
"Can you just slap me please" I beg when you leave I beg in between sobs.
I think we are so accustomed to the stereotypical severe issues in society. I agree 100000% that those are really damn serious. But with the narrowed focus on those as the key issues, other less known problems are shoved aside and not treated with the same sympathy and care. Yes, physical and sexual abuse, rape, severe medical conditions and illnesses like cancer, divorced parents, death of a loved one - all of these are indeed major major issues.
However, what annoys me in a way is that it is the over exposure of these problems that moulds our minds to only deem those big taboos as the only problems that are worthy of being shared. What about the stories of perceived verbal and emotional abuse, what about the stories of self condemnation and mitigation when you feel like a failure/burden. Where are they? Deep hidden inside of us Coz we are too afraid to beat them out to the world Coz we have this gnawing anxiety that we will just see faces of
anti-climatic "oh so that's all?"
When we muster up the courage to share our pain to people who say they are going to listen to us no matter what.
"My problem is not a problem at all, I am imagining it all, people don't seem to be heartbroken when I tell them the very words that pierced through my heart. What gives me the right to even be crying??"
After years of brainwashing, I find myself thinking this way with the bombardment of sterotypes so much so that once I don't fit into the neat tiny boxes of certified and justified feelings of pain, I am merely being a weak attention seeking person who can't even deal with trivial problems.
I think that what needs to happen is not to assure people that "pain is relative" - it may work for some, but for others like me, and I hope there are - I think the revolutionary step is to enhance the awareness of the validity of every problem and not just the commonly discussed ones. To encourage a climate of mutual sharing and lack of judgement and promote understanding and helping hands.
So...