Pain

First of all, I just want to apologize for being away for a while. I hope that you all did not miss me too much. We are all different so we all deal with things like pain, in different ways. That is a given. Pain comes in different forms like physical pain and emotional pain. We automatically associate pain with being hurt. They go hand in hand together. I am sorry to say this, but nobody can avoid pain forever. It is not so much about the pain, but how you deal with the pain. Marc Maron says it best. “You can’t avoid pain in life. It’s how you handle pain, that’s what defines you.” I deal with the pain by writing about it and talking about it. There are some times when I stay quiet and do not say anything about it. It is okay to speak up about it because like I said before, pain and being hurt go hand in hand.

As crazy as this sounds, the pain does eventually go away. It may not seem like it will, but over time it will and there will be some pain that may stick around. This quote by Philippos Syrigos says it the best. “Pain never really goes away; you just elevate and get used to it by growing stronger.” In other words, the pain never truly goes away, but you gets used to it and makes you feel stronger. It makes you feel tougher and maybe closer to being indestructible. Not quite indestructible all the way, but it makes you feel like you can handle anything once you handle and deal with the pain. You learn so much through the pain. One of my favorite quotes by Alicia Taylor says it best. “Sometimes you must to hurt in order to know, fall in order to grow, lose in order to gain, because life’s greatest lessons are learned through pain.” And she is so right. Things in life feel painful and hurt a lot, but you have to go through all of the pain to learn those lessons.

Like I said before, you should know at least how to deal with the pain. Some people know how to, but some people do not and that is okay. You eventually learn over time. You just sometimes have to simply deal with it. James Jones said it best. “He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain.” In other words, it is acknowledging and knowing pain. Sometimes it may not seem as bad as it looks or feels. One of the best feelings is when the pain stops. For a lot of people, it may not, but for some it may stop all the way. It is like seeing again for the first time or like a new dawn or day or however you want to look at it. It feels so liberating. Here is to all of my readers, may you find a way to deal with the pain.

I can go on and on about pain. I could tell you why it comes and how to deal with it, but everyone is different in that, so why bother. All I can do is to make some final pieces of advice… Whatever you do, do not not ignore it because if you ignore it, pain will fester and may turn into something even worse. We can end up hurting ourselves or worse, unintentionally hurting others. Dean Kootz, I think says it the best way. “Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows.” So in other words, we should never ignore the pain. I am not here to say you should stay with it for long, but everyone is different. There are so many amazing quotes out there about pain and how to deal or cope with it. So I will stop there. Here is a poem to make everyone realize that there is almost always something good after the pain and that although it hurts now, it will go away after some time. I just want to make one final point which is although you are dealing with pain now, you should never give someone else pain on purpose. I just wanted to point that out. Cheers!!

When The Pain Stops