Our relationship to pain– how we react and respond to it– changes everything.

This idea ruminated in my mind from the moment I saw it.  My thoughts latched onto this because I don’t have a healthy relationship to pain.  I avoid it at all costs until I come into contact with it.  Once agony and I collide, I can’t let go.  My stubborn perseverance encourages me that there’s some prize for enduring the most pain.  It’s a fool’s prize– the one given to marginalized people as an incentive for their silence.

But pain is a cat burglar.  Denying it entry only motivates it to break a window, infiltrate a vent, wind itself inside a hiding place just long enough to jump out and scare you when you’ve convinced yourself pain is long gone.

What if I were open to aching?  What if I acknowledged the thief as it entered?  These aren’t solutions.  Then again, these days, I’m no longer in search of the answers.  I just want to ask better questions.  We weld questions so complicated that the simplest answers become out of reach.

For now, all I can do is become a doorway and witness to my own discomfort.  I seize my right to arrest my pain by acknowledging and addressing it.  I’ve spent too long being a bystander in my own suffering.