I Think We’re Terrified of Pain

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece called “The Pitfalls of Perfectionism.” The piece seemed to have a lot of hope — I was certain it would be gracing the blog within the next few days. I workshopped and edited and revised and then suddenly, as I was reading it, I had a moment of utter doom when I realized: well, this isn’t about perfectionism at all. Humbling, as always. I thought about scrapping the piece altogether. But then I read it over once more, and I asked myself: if this isn’t about perfectionism, then what is it about?

I realized that despite the title I had assigned to the piece, the two-thousand or so words I had written were actually telling a story that far transcended the conversation about trying to be perfect. On the pages in front of me existed something else entirely — a commentary on mankind’s chronic fear of pain. 

You see—every so often, I type a whole bunch of words or string together a handful of sentences and they end up on a page. And then, I re-read it and think: I wrote that? No chance. And it’s not so much a self-diminishing thing in which I belittle my wisdom or talent as much as it is a moment of complete confusion in which I’m forced to wonder: who or what just infiltrated my consciousness and delivered these words onto this here page? Because I know for sure that it wasn’t me. 

This piece was one of those moments. I wanted to write a piece about perfectionism, but the universe had other plans. And I am not in any position to argue with the universe. So today, in a piece written by me but wholly inspired by some really wonderful entity that occasionally overtakes my consciousness, I will tell you why we need to stop fearing pain.  So, without further adieu:

“I Think We’re Terrified of Pain” 

Love is pain, they say.

I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just thought provoking. It’s a way to obscure the lines between love and dependence. It’s a cynical sort of poetry to fuse love and pain together in that way; to suggest that they are one in the same, as though to know love is to know pain. 

To truly know love is to know vulnerability, because to love is to place your heart in the hands of another, hoping they handle it gently, but ultimately knowing that they could crush it if they so please. To love is to be the one who hands over their heart while knowing all of this, and still says I am open to the potential of pain if it means I was able to know this degree of love. Love cannot be pain. But I see where the two feelings have become conflated. People say “I’m afraid of falling in love.” I hate to take away from anyone’s moment of love-fearing melodrama, but nobody is actually afraid of falling in love. People are just afraid of getting hurt, because they’re afraid of feeling pain. Oh, but how beautifully dramatic and woe-is-me it is to tell people we fear love. It’s a lot less socially acceptable to be honest and say, love sounds awesome, I’m just terrified of loving enough to feel the pain that might come with it. 

We’ve certainly come to associate love and pain together in a distorted way, but this pain-fearing dynamic isn’t unique to love. It’s a universal human experience that dominates every area of our lives. 

Think about all of the experiences that we consider to be painful: rejection, embarrassment, shame, hurt, disappointment, regret, loss, heartbreak. We give them all different names, but at the end of the day, they all emit the same reaction. All of these feelings are just pain taking different forms.

And as humans, we are absolutely terrified of pain, regardless of what form it takes. If it's painful, we don’t want it. And we’ll do just about anything to avoid it.

I’m not talking about the kind of pain that comes when we fall off our bike and scrape our knees, or get a paper cut. I’m referring to the kind of pain that comes when we watch the world chip away at our once open, innocent hearts. 

Pain of the heart is entirely different than pain of the body. 

For instance, let’s say I break my wrist. Maybe I cry a little bit, I go to the doctor, the nurses do a few X-rays, and then I get a cast and am on my way. Within a few weeks, my wrist will have healed and my cast will be gone. There won’t even be scars. Most people will never know about my broken wrist, and I’ll move on from the injury. 

But let’s say I tell someone I love them. They tell me they don’t feel the same way. Suddenly, my entire being feels panicked. My heart begins to race and my voice starts shaking. There is no doctor to go to. There is no cast to heal my broken heart. There is just shame, embarrassment, and regret. Really, there is just pain. I promise myself: I will never tell someone I love them again. And I close my heart. 

This process is entirely paradoxical; when we close our hearts in the wake of hurt, we close in that pain with it. It’s like we lock the bad guy in our house with us. We never release that pain, so we feel like we’re stuck with it. We just let it fester in the deepest part of our soul, convincing us we’re incapable of love. We attach to the pain, telling ourselves I am hurt instead of I’ve been hurt. The problem with this is that, in affirming to ourselves that we are hurt, we don’t allow ourselves to let go of the pain that infects our heart, and thus we never heal. 

We allow this fear of pain to control us, so much so that we build our lives around it. We wake up each morning and armor up. We take inventory of the fortresses we’ve built around our hearts to make sure there’s no cracks or leakages that could let pain in. We justify this armor by saying we wear it because we’re strong — that we don’t need to be soft for the world because that won’t get us anywhere. But this story we tell ourselves about how cold and tough we are isn’t true, and we know this. We aren’t “emotionally unavailable.” Rather, we’ve locked the door to our hearts and allowed them to dwell in loneliness for so long that we aren’t entirely sure where the key is, and maybe it’s just easier to never find out. The armor we wear is not a mark of strength, but rather, it is an indication of our ego’s weakness. If we were really as strong as we say we are, we wouldn’t need armor at all. 

If we were really being strong, we would brave the world free of the shields and fortresses we hide behind each day. We would stop running from hurt and we would start living a life inspired by love rather than stunted by fear. We would tell the people we love that we love them without worrying if they’d say it back. We’d chase our greatest dreams despite knowing that there’s a chance that we’ll fail. We’d apologize first and we’d forgive easier. We’d be free from the iron grip that this fear of pain has held us in since the moment the world convinced us that experiencing pain is something to be ashamed of - something that should somehow make us feel unworthy or like we did something wrong by loving enough or dreaming enough or caring enough to feel that pain. 

Once we stop telling ourselves that feeling pain makes us weak or unworthy, we find out that sitting with the pain we feel, free of armor, is the most brave thing we can do.  

In moments when I want to shut my heart to the world in fear of getting hurt, I find myself thinking: What a tragedy it would be if I left this Earth and the people I cared about never knew just how much I cared about them because I couldn’t swallow my pride to let them know. Or, what a tragedy it would be if I spent my final minutes of this lifetime wishing I had at least tried for my dreams, wishing I had told the boy how I feel about him, wishing I had lived instead of spent a lifetime running from getting hurt. 

When we free ourselves from this fear of pain, we find a life overflowing with love. We learn that our greatest gift to the world is the love we have to offer. A love we can put into the world, knowing that it will somehow find its way back to us. A love that is epic. A love that is forgiving. A love we feel so deeply that the potential of pain becomes no more than an afterthought. 

Brene Brown writes: “The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.” 

It is only in embracing the potential of pain that we’re able to get more of what we really want out of life. More love, more adventure, more opportunities. More light. So I encourage you to shed light on your fear of pain. When you find yourself wanting to close your heart to the world, force yourself to remain open. To stop running from feeling the hurt. Let the pain sink into your bones, weighing on your heart and remind yourself I would never feel love if I wasn’t also willing to feel pain. Have gratitude for the experience of hurting, because knowing that you love someone so much or want something so badly that you’re willing to put your entire heart into it is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a superpower.  

With love, 

Cail