On Suffering

I've been dealing with some illness and pain for a while now. I don't generally tell people this or talk about it a lot unless they're good friends who really care, or unless they're annoying people who ask me why I'm not working or what I'm doing with my life. (Honesty!) The extremes, I suppose. It's trickled out enough now that plenty of people know, even if they don't know the extent. The others who don’t know — many of them good friends — would be sympathetic, I’m sure, but there’s just that part of me that hasn’t figured out how to tell them, or why.

I don't know completely why I don't talk about it tons, but I have ideas — I don't want to be a complainer, I don't want it to be the only thing I talk about even if it's the only thing I have to talk about, I don't want it to rule my life, I don't want undue attention when it's really my issue to handle, plenty of other people have (bigger) problems, I'm not sure people will understand, I don't want to be told how I'm supposed to deal with it, I'm easily tired by people asking if I'm better yet or if I've improved (no and no, and you have no idea), I'm afraid people just won't care, etc. I think the biggest reason is because, for a very long time, I thought I just had aches and pains like everyone else, and even when I knew it was more, I thought it would be gone soon enough, or I'd work through it. I don't have a terminal disease; ergo, get some bootstraps, and pull yourself up by them.

It's been going on for some time, though, and the tougher days are when I realize it's becoming my new reality not only in my body but also in my mind. I'm not going to wake up OK tomorrow. The next doctor's visit is not going to have the magic cure. This, and all its limitations and loss, could be my life.

Like any good American, go-getter, overachiever, or modern Christian, I made a plan and attacked the things that were keeping me down. I watched my friends lose weight on Facebook, and I treated sickness the same way, setting goals and coaching myself along. I've been reading Stuart Scott's Every Day I Fight, looking to glean some lessons from him punching cancer in the gut without quit. I've preached to myself about the power of positive thinking, of getting my head screwed on straight and choosing to overcome.

But there's a reason things like this are so hard to deal with — it's because they're hard. If they could be conquered just by some positive thinking or repeating a truth back to yourself, they wouldn't be the kind of things that change people's lives, that leave them in a funk for years or maybe change them forever. Pain, illness, and any form of suffering hurt. They attack, and the reason they hurt so much is because that's what they're geared to do. They control you in a way that makes you befuddled why they’re not gone, and why you couldn't take them down like any other problem. It's called suffering not because of the initial pain, discomfort, or displacement, but because of the prolonged siege it does on your soul. Something that anyone would look at from the outside — that you once looked at from the outside — and judge as a problem (but a problem that could be addressed with something akin to a 30-day weight loss program) has instead climbed deep into your heart and robbed you of things you're afraid you'll never get back. And you don't know what it means.

When I look back through the years I’ve been dealing with different forms of physical pain, it’s never the actual pain or limitations that really get me. The hardest part, by far, has been in the mind and the soul. I was shy for years about saying that I suffered, because I think that term should be reserved for heavy-duty pain. But now I accept it as a word that covers a lot of issues, and I think that we all suffer more than we admit. I think we all follow the path I did in some way — the denial, the attempt to be better, the hiding of our pain and faults, thinking we can get past them.

I unfortunately am not here to tell any sufferers how to get past their pain. But I do want to share some thoughts in the hope that one or two may be a lifeline similar to the ones I have grabbed at different times. This living study of suffering we all do is part of the larger relational aspect of life, and despite my years of waffling and staying silent, I’d be remiss not to share now, knowing that we all indeed do suffer and can go anywhere not by our bootstraps but by lifting each other up.