How to stop your pain

Most of what you call coping is just delay. The pain you have been outrunning has not moved. It is exactly where you left it, wanting to be heard.

I spent a lot of my thirties looking for ways to not be alone with what was clawing inside me.

Some nights it was the burn of alcohol going down. Some nights it was work that did not need to be done but at least kept my hands moving. Some nights it was the screen, hours of scrolling past other people’s lives until my eyes ached and the night was used up and I could sleep without thinking. Each of these was a way of not being alone with what was waiting underneath.

It was always still there in the morning. A pressure under the ribs. A tightness behind the throat. The same weight, sitting up earlier than I had.

Numbing is reliable in the short term, which is why people use it. It does what it says on the label. The hour you spend drunk or scrolling or asleep is an hour you do not have to spend with the thing in your chest.

The bill always comes due, and the longer you delay it the higher it gets.

You start to feel it in places that are not the original pain. You snap at somebody who did not earn it. Your laugh sounds wrong in your own ear. The voice in your head, the one that narrates your life, gets meaner. It says things to you it would not say to anybody else, and yet it is saying them inside your skull, in your own voice, and there is no escape from it.

What you tried to numb did not stop existing. It started speaking through the back door.

What I did not understand for a long time is that the pain you run from and the pain you face are not the same animal. The pain you face passes through you. The pain you run from chases you. It does not get tired. It does not give up. Every defence you stack between you and it is something it has to push through to reach you, and the pushing only makes it stronger.

The thing chasing you is not an enemy. It seems like one because that is what years of running have made of it. You ran. It chased. Every year of running made the chase more intense. By the time you turn around, the screaming is unbearable, and you have decided in advance that the thing at the door must be a monster.

But it’s not a monster. It is a friend who has been calling for years. The volume only got loud because you were too busy running away from it.

Pain is the thing in your life that has been trying hardest to talk to you, and you have been the hardest to reach.

One night I sat on my balcony with no phone, no music, no drink. Somebody had said the words “sit with it” and the phrase had stayed in my head. The night air was cool. The railing under my arms was colder. I had no idea what sitting with it meant. I had a vague expectation that it would be unbearable.

The pain came. It tore at me the way I had been afraid it would. It had things to say that I had not let it say in years.

I let it say them.

I did not try to argue. I did not try to fix. I did not get up. I sat and I listened. For the first time in years, the thing in my chest had somebody across the table from it. Somebody who would not look away. Somebody who would not reach for a bottle to make it shut up.

It took an hour, maybe less. Then it was done. Not gone.

Finished.

The way a wave that has broken on a beach is finished. The water is still around your ankles, but the wave itself has spent itself.

What was left in my chest was quiet. The voice in my head had stopped its small mean speech. The pain had said what it came to say, and what it came to say was something I needed to hear. I would not have heard it any other way.

The self-improvement genre will not tell you this, because the books would be much shorter. Pain is not your enemy. It is not your teacher either. It is something more practical than that. It is information about what you have lost, what you are afraid of, what you have refused to look at. It will keep delivering this information for as long as you keep running. It is patient that way.

The move is submission. The submission is not a fight you lost. It is a posture you choose. You sit down. You take nothing into your hands. You let the thing that has been chasing you for years walk up to you and sit across from you. You let it speak. You do not interrupt.

The monster turns out to have been a friend the whole time. He just stopped being friendly somewhere in the third decade of you running away from it.

What waits on the other side is not a breakthrough. It is not bliss. At best, you find yourself no longer carrying that particular tension. The pressure under the ribs might ease. The voice in the head might quiet. The laugh might start to sound right again. The life you were trying to live underneath all the noise might become audible. None of it is guaranteed. None of it can happen at all while you keep running.

So sit with it. Face it. Hear it out.

It has something very important to tell you.