Pain Tolerance

The word "comfortable" sounds like paradise to me. I tend to see words as pictures and little films, so when I hear it I picture myself stretched out beside a pool at some villa on the Italian Riviera, soaking up the sun with a virgin pina colada and a bottle of Pierre mineral water, a New York bestseller open on my lap, slipping into the water for a swim whenever the mood takes me. For most people the real meaning runs quieter: a life you can move through without worry, money and stress somehow at peace with each other, the rough patches handled so cleanly it feels like they never happened.

What the word has come to mean for me is different. It's less about feeling at ease and more about being at ease inside myself, in my own skin. Whatever surrounds me comes second. What matters first is whether the person I am can stand in the world and genuinely accept it.

We tend to tie happiness and comfort to the belief that if we chase both hard enough, the pain will stop. That belief is part of why, when you're wrestling with a mental illness, you catch yourself whispering that you'll never be happy, that you'll never be perfect unless you can get the illness under control. But if you actually want to be comfortable and happy, you have to accept pain. Sometimes you even have to invite it in, because that's what turns you into a better version of yourself. Saying that is one thing. Letting the pain through the door is another, since we're wired to sprint away from it.

You've probably heard the line: pain is inevitable, suffering is not. A few months back I was sitting in one of my group therapy sessions. We were talking about pain, and when my turn came to share, I noticed something. For a solid month I'd been walking in with the same story every single day, griping about the same things. The only reason I felt okay was those ten minutes of ranting to people who understood me, who carried the same so-called problems I did. Then I'd go home, spend the night in hell with my own negative self-talk, and come back the next morning to do it again. A loop that fed itself.

It broke the day a therapist asked us, "Have you ever thought about making room for pain?" To me that landed like being asked whether I'd penciled a death date into my calendar. Everyone in the group stared at her with a look that said, are you out of your mind? Her question was the one that saved us.

We spend our lives steering around pain, hurt, heartbreak. None of those are pleasant, and nobody's pretending otherwise. Yet we forget we need experiences like that to grow. It's uncomfortable to sit with, but for the world to move forward, people die and cruel, unbearable things happen to people every day, things entirely outside our control. The events we watch on the news, hear about secondhand, or live through ourselves are reshaping the world the moment they occur. Pain arrives, and once it does, the only thing we can do is comfort it and comfort ourselves.

Making room for pain is a brilliant idea precisely because we've trained ourselves to treat pain as something we should never let in. When it shows up we meet it with anxiety and emotions turned up past the limit. The thoughts come fast: "OMFG this hurts like nothing else," or "I can't believe I was stupid enough to land myself in this much pain," or "I can't fix this, so I'll just fight it until I feel better." Pain hijacks the mind. Mental illness pours physical pain into the mix too, through self-harm, on top of everything it does to the mind. Having no room set aside for pain when it's already at the door leaves you wide open to catastrophe. I'd bet most of us know that feeling firsthand.

So maybe you're reading this thinking, interesting idea, but how am I supposed to make room for pain when I have no clue when it's coming? Fair. I'll admit I haven't mastered this concept either, though I believe in it completely. We have to leave space for accidents. Mistakes happen. We don't need a quick fix for every problem life throws at us. What we deal with daily is really the question of how we approach life at all.

For me it clicked when I stopped obsessing over where I belonged and who I belonged with. One day I just said it out loud with some confidence: I land somewhere between the punk-rocker meditation Hawaiian-dancer girl and the academic, and no, I don't know where I'm headed, but I'm going to live in reality. Life can't do the choosing for us. We join it by handing it something only we have to give. Pain might be the big bad wolf, but no success gets built without it. - Susan Page