It is often the worst and darkest and most painful and strange and humiliating things in our lives which, once openly stated and seen, connect us the most as human beings. When we talk about going deep or getting real with someone, we are generally talking about the things which make us hurt, not how tough or cool we are. My sense is that people want to say these things to each other more but we don’t really have the moral or emotional language for it. We tend to emphasize gestures of external strength and power over others while seeing little value in our pain and vulnerability. On the other hand, the things which make us suffer the most are often the very things that make us most human — it is human to suffer and cope with our suffering — and it is only through facing our vulnerabilities and limitations and flaws and darkness and pain that we can change them and move toward the light. I think our suffering, or the inner qualities that suffering requires of us, is of the utmost value. There may be nothing more valuable in this world.
As is often the case, the reverse is also true: Our pain and darkness, when repressed and unseen, is the ultimate barrier between people. Everyone has their own private suffering and darkness, their own limitations and vulnerabilities, the things which take us out of life, and our own unprocessed pain gets in the way of appreciating the pain of others and experiencing genuine love and connection. There may be no deeper need in the human soul than to be seen and known and heard and loved by others, and if we are not seeing what someone is dealing with, we are not really seeing them in their fullness and cannot really know or love them. We quite naturally feel some sense of allegiance to our suffering and more or less unconsciously identify with it, and when someone seems to deny or downplay our pain, it’s like they are attacking our very selves and the urge arises to return the blow. All sorts of conflict and pain flows from this mutual unseeing: Someone says something in the heat of a conflict that hurts us and it feels like they are dishonoring everything we have ever been through in our lives, and we hit back to make their pain feel likewise invisible and insignificant. I think we naturally resent when someone can’t see the ways we suffer, and, typically, we fight over not being seen rather than whatever the problem was supposed to be.
We tear each other apart out of our own unseen pain and utterly destroy each other with invisibility, and modern human relations too often devolve into an implicit moral power game over who’s suffering is more meaningful and important. This is where the cultural emphasis on privilege – our advantages and disadvantages relative to others – can go sour: We become more invested in comparing and contrasting each other’s situations than simply bringing attention and care and compassion and consciousness to wherever the suffering happens to be. This to me just shows how much weight we put into the meaning of our suffering, and how things might change if it became conscious. I believe unacknowledged suffering is the greatest source of conflict in this world, and acknowledging the variety and complexity and depth of human suffering is the way of peace.
If it is our pain and vulnerability more than our outward strengths and achievements that make us human, bringing us together through their admission and tearing us apart through their denial, I think the effort is to better recognize our own pain and then extend that awareness and sensitivity to the suffering of others and from there cultivate a certain humility in the face of suffering and a certain respect for the underlying qualities that suffering demands: drawing moral strength from each other’s many different struggles, tethering together a kind of humanism from the invisible suffering all around us and filling the spiritual void at the center of modern life with pure human seeing and togetherness. It’s about using our differences to reveal our underlying sameness, seeing ourselves in each other’s pain and struggles. This is what it means to reconcile our differences, not necessarily to make them go away but to put them in a different and warmer light. This requires both sympathy and empathy, extending care and concern for people whose situations we admittedly don’t understand and then going on to imagine their experiences from our perspective to genuinely understand where they’re coming from. When we understand each other’s pain, we’re golden; when we don’t, there’s conflict and more pain. I think so many of the world’s problems come down to a simple inability or unwillingness to deal with the reality of another person.
It’s a lot to ask for us to take in the suffering of another when we all have our own, and there’s too much suffering in the world at any given moment to even begin to fathom. But if it’s true and not just an abstraction that our suffering is in some way connected and within each of us is the power to change each other’s lives by seeing each other’s pain, an urgency arises to deal with people how we wish to be dealt with, to see as we wish to be seen. There is a point at which your pain and my pain meet, through the mutual recognition of respective vulnerability, that completely changes the tone of our relationships. If what we are, at bottom, are these seers, this quality of seeing, the point is to see more and better, to broaden and deepen and clarify our vision of life to incorporate more of reality. If human beings are our own worst enemy, we are also our own salvation. I believe people can save each other. We are all we have, anyways.
Hi Sam
I think I used to follow you on Facebook. It's cool to see you writing on substack.
This post spoke to me - especially with regards to the sharing of suffering as a bridge over the chasm of human isolation and separateness. To let go of one's ego, when it is so fostered in suffering (the view that says "my pain is worse than yours") is one of the hardest things to do because we have already suffered and the notion of letting our proverbial guard down is too frightening for we fear further carnage of the soul. But this fear is not realised, when we see that suffering is general and goes across creeds, culture and colour. Anything that suggests otherwise is an act of political expediency.
Enjoying your pieces - take care
Another really good post Samuel. Thank you.