My Pain is Not Special
Neither is yours. But you are.
My life has been full of pain, perhaps more than many people but less than others, certainly not bad by the standards of history. After all, imagine your life without analgesic drugs like Advil and Tylenol, to say nothing of anesthetic, allergy pills, and the fact that you are almost definitely not starving unless you are choosing to1. Sometimes my pain is acute, like the night I lay writhing and crying on the floor with my kids staring out from their bedroom and my wife trying desperately to help me. At those times the pain is all consuming. It is what defines me. My humanity is, in a sense, erased. The choices I have made become irrelevant, my faith inaccessible, my thoughts unintelligible. Most of the time, thank God, it's manageable, hovering in the background, even forgettable for short periods. Then it constitutes a set of constraints on my personality, putting limits and controls on the rest of my life but allowing space for that life to exist and even flourish.
Although every life is unique, special, and infinitely valuable in the eyes of God, and my pain is an important part of me, it’s not special. There is nothing more universal than suffering. One might say death, but death is a state of being, not an experience per-se. The one experience we are guaranteed is pain. We feel pain at birth, our heads being squeezed out a small opening and our warm skin suddenly cold and exposed. As we go through life we may not have good relationships, food, love, sex, or joy, but nobody gets through to the other side without pain. My suffering is not what, if anything, makes me special. My suffering is what unites me with all conscious beings. As I can suffer so can you, and so can a saint or a villain.
As a kid being sick made me different, weak, unable to participate. There was sympathy but mostly it was a barrier I had to get over. I slowly learned how to navigate between what I wanted to do and my limits, as we all must. But it didn’t entitle me to anything. It was life. To the degree I felt it was something special and valuable it was part of what led me into a deep depression in my teens. It wasn’t helpful.
When I had my Lupus diagnosis (now repealed), I was initiated into a new world of social-illness, where people can connect to others like themselves no matter how small the group, receive support and then broadcast their group membership on social media. I was encouraged by this milieu to view my illness as something special, quirky and interesting, good material for memes about the medical system, or how one should treat a person with such an illness, or fundraising pitches. People with Lupus were not individuals who suffer from an illness, but ‘Lupies,’ or ‘Lupus warriors.’
I took on the identity. I posted about it a few times. I wanted people to know about this important part of my life, how it explained some of my new strange behaviors, like covering my skin as much as possible to avoid any exposure to the sun. I ended up looking like a ghost. After about a year every story about it started to meld into one another, and then I saw, or more accurately was reminded, how we were all really the same, delicate creatures making our way through a broken world. We glom onto any explanation for our suffering, any cause, as ‘the cause.’ It gives us hope because if the cause is something simple then maybe it can be fixed. But even if the particular pain stops it doesn’t save us. We still get tummy aches, depression, broken hearts, distance from God, enui, existential angst, fear for the future, guilt for the past. Life keeps on coming.
Literature gives us a window into the minds of others. The people are not real, but we can see real truths about what it means to be human. And if there is one thing reading has taught me, along with my actual life, it’s that everybody has pain; physical, psychological and spiritual. It may be that as a system the government should provide certain benefits to people with particular conditions, because there but for the grace of God go any one of us. That's a political question. But inter-personally, nothing special is owed me because of my pain. Something special, love and attention is owed to every person, and their pain, and hopefully their joy and pleasure too, by virtue of having a soul created in the divine image. Or as my old philosophy professor would say, because of ontological parity, the shared fact of our existence. In my mind they're two ways of saying the same thing.
Political necessity, or the perception of necessity, drives people to weaponize, sloganize and memeify their pain. But I refuse to make my suffering a grand cause, or a rhetorical shield to justify my complaints against the medical system and it's (many) failings. That's so much less important than what it really is, one part of the life and experience of a person. It makes me smaller, not greater. I would like to be taken seriously because I have a soul, a mind, humanity. I have no special claim on your pity or your attention. Your pain is as real as mine, your suffering as deep, your tears as wet, your frustration as justified. It's not what makes us unique and special. It's what makes us the same.
Before We Part
Apologies
Last week I didn’t manage to get one of these out. I decided putting out something worth reading was more important than sending it out on time. I also decided not to send out an explanatory email as that would just be junk in your inbox. I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts about that or on anything else, in a reply to this email or here.
Elections, Elections
I do have thoughts on the elections, both here and in the US. I’m going to give things a bit more time to settle on the ground and in my mind before putting them down here though. All I have to say for the moment is that those of us living in Israel and the US should be grateful to live in countries where the people in charge can actually be booted out. We don’t get our way much of the time, but it’s the least bad system out there. So congratulations on being part of the tiny percentage of humans in history with some input on how the rules governing their lives are made.
What am I Up To?
I’ve been a bit out of sorts. Spending lots of energy on my health and the rest on my family. There’s not too much left over. The only thing I’ve been doing other than that is reading (audio-books). I’ve been making my way through Norwegian superstar Karl-Ove Knausgaard’s monumental ‘My Struggle.’ I enjoyed the first five volumes to varying degrees. They are all about the personal experience, with little reference to literary norms or analysis. The sixth and final volume is an insult to the reader who enjoyed those things about the first five. It includes hundreds of pages of unreadable literary analysis. Not sure what to make of it except that it’s a deliberate provocation. Well, I’m provoked!
Also, next Thursday Daniella will be having a procedure done. Prayers for a speedy recovery will be appreciated for Daniella Naomi bat Uriella Hinda Bayla. Thank you!
Later Gator
Please God I’ll see you next week. In the mean time if this email was forwarded to you please subscribe. If you’re a subscriber, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. There is no paywall but support is much appreciated. If you're already paying, thank you! And remember, sharing is caring.
Peace and Blessings,
-Eitan
If I’m wrong about this, and you are indeed starving, I apologize. Write to me.
Another awesome post. To me my pain is a fence. When the pain is worse the fenced area I inhabit gets smaller. Eventually I am confined to my bed or the couch and when the pain is relieved sometimes almost completely the fence pulls out into the just perceptible distance. I can never not see it and can never forget my pain can change at any time. It is very hard to be in a state of grace when overwhelmed with pain, when getting through it is the primary goal, but there is nothing like the grace of those rare times when the pain is less and the world opens up and the horizon expands. I want more of those less pain and broad horizon days for you.