Poem: Ode to Pain

Pain.

We often think of pain as an experience that interrupts the
general trend of “feeling fine.”

More than we’d like to think, the
reverse is true.

Many people we know are ALWAYS in real invisible
pain, every moment of every day.

They remain silent about it.

Most
times we fail to bear that in mind.

Pain as a default is exhausting.

It is physically and emotionally draining.

Pain can make relating to
loved ones “normally” seem so hard.

We prefer to put other
people’s pain out of our mind if we cannot relate to their situation.

We expect them to ‘fix it.”

But the successful fixing is often
selfish.

Often, what we think of as a person’s rudeness is actually
the result of all their effort to fight through pain to respond to us.

There are many people who cannot remember the last time they felt no
pain.

If they felt that absence again, they’d feel like superheroes.

People in pain are conditioned to think that the pain THEY feel is an
inconvenience and an affront to OTHERS.

Like that makes sense.

People
who are not in constant pain often cannot understand the toll pain
takes on those who are.

The result is that people in pain often not
only have to feel pain, but guilt and stress ABOUT feeling pain — a
self-inflicted weight.

The problem is that those who are in pain are
conditioned to be silent.

To not whine.

To suck it up.

There’s also a cultural view of pain as weakness,
which makes people sometimes unaware of how to express their pain.

Because the idea of someone being in unrelenting pain is so horrifying
to us, we’d rather believe that people are exaggerating about it.

Unfortunately, pain makes people uncomfortable because they don’t know
how to help.

So they resent it instead.