Pain in Living Color

There are so many different kinds of pain. It comes in more variety than the colors of the rainbow. How can one begin to define something that comes in such varied forms?

Physical pain is something that we are all familiar with. In our lives, it's the Pavlovian negative reinforcement by which we learn self-preservation. When a child places its hand on a hot pan, the pain of the experience teaches the child not to repeat that action. Physical pain is our signal that we are either doing something wrong or dangerous or that something is wrong with our bodies. Something I heard once comes to mind when I think of physical pain: what does the doctor say if you tell him that "it hurts when I do this"? He says, "then don't do that anymore." The simple and nearly immediate impulses firing across the synapses of our nervous system make the sensation that is pain into a very real and tangible feeling. It is something that can be measured and quantified because there is always something to compare the suffering of the moment to.

Emotional pain, however, is much less easily identified, though it, too, tends to play an important role in all of our lives. This is where the cut-and-dried "it hurts" tends to fade into the vast ambiguity of the undefinable. Anyone can easily tell you what hurts, where it hurts, or how badly it hurts when they are suffering physically, but when it comes to defining that mysterious pain of the heart (or the elusive and oft-debated soul) most people are at a loss. So many of our experiences are coloured by the brush strokes of our inner pain that it makes for an almost kaleidoscopic view of our lives.

There are so many sources of pain; it arises from loves lost, the finality of death, friendships forgotten, or failure to complete a goal. It can rear its ugly head even in the best of times in our existence. Often times the things (and people) we love the best have the power to hurt us the most. In the world of man, one person's pain is often another person's pleasure. Such a relative thing is so hard to define, almost impossible to quantify, and definitely impossible to avoid. We all cause and feel pain all of the time and it is this pain that makes us who we are.

Surely, some of us deal with it better than others. Some of us have the ability to turn our pain to good use, making the best of every bad situation. Some of us take our own internal suffering out on those around us, spreading it like a virus through the people that we come into contact with. Then there are those of us (like me) who tend to bottle up what hurts. It might be easy to put things into words when no one knows the author, but when it comes to actually dealing with something that hurts so badly, we clam up. We bury our hurt and our sorrow deep inside so that (we think) it can't hurt us or anyone else by rearing its ugly head.

Of course hiding from the pain doesn't do any good. It's still there, it's still real, it still marks everything that we do, and it just builds and festers inside of us, growing like a virus that infects every part of our lives. How do you recover from that? How can you strip the colors of your pain from the canvas of your life and start painting anew? The problem is that first and foremost, you have to categorize your pain and that's the hardest part of all. When it comes to that difficult task, I think I'm too scarred to find a place to start. That's what happens when you feel too much, get too involved, and hide your hurt... you become jaded, cynical, and broken beyond repair. Life turns into a Van Gogh watercolor, beautiful and distressed...