So you know how much fun it is to play the pain game? Like when we look at other people and think how much better or worse we have it when compared to them? And when we win we also lose because either we have more pain and that sucks, or we have less pain and therefore less right to feel justified in our misery?

Pain is not really quantifiable, and therefore setting up inequalities seems a rather fruitless enterprise. There’s no way to measure how a negative experience will affect one person versus another, let alone the impact of different types of experiences. Comparing pain just isn’t possible.

But of course, we still do it all the time. We want justification for our unhappiness. We want to feel like we deserve to be unhappy. That we’ve earned it. And so this means looking at other people for cues. If that person is unhappy because of this, then certainly I’m allowed to feel unhappy because of that. Or if I am able to cope with this event, then why can’t that person? Why are they making such a big deal of their pain when I’m doing everything in my power to minimize the damage and keep it out of sight?

And so we become invested in other people being hurt. We can feel good when we know they are more damaged than us. Or feel bad because they are coping with something so much better. We judge and judge and judge some more. Deciding when people have a right to behave in a certain way and when they are “over-reacting” or “milking it” or “being melodramatic” or “just doing it for the attention.” And all the while we ignore that all that bullshit is irrelevant, because that person is in pain so the only thing that matters is how they can find a way to heal.

Really, we should not need to play games with our pain. Because we know how it feels when people are measuring themselves based off of us, and when they are comparing our pain in order to judge us. And it fucking sucks. When people assume that they have had similar experiences that they have “handled better” and so they somehow have the right to tell us how to deal with things. Pain is not something that requires any justification, we can just feel it when we feel it, and handle it however we choose to handle it.

So pain is not a worthwhile investment. We can’t win or lose at the pain game, because it just sucks for everyone. Instead of spending our time trying to be better or worse at suffering, we could spend that effort working in tandem to heal each other’s hurts. And rather than splashing about in our separate misery puddles, we could seek to soak them up together.