On Mandatory Suffering

I’ve been contemplating suffering.

I’ve been suffering pain in my body chronically for decades…my autoimmune system (has two diseases!) on high-alert for as long as I can remember…and more recently, a lower-back issue that’s been on-and-off since 2022.

The term ‘comparative suffering’ has been bopping around between my parts for years now too. I don’t want to go to the interwebs on this one…to discover who coined the term and what it means, as I’m sure my brain is not the first to put these two words together. I don’t know if I read it or if I heard it or if what it means to me has been enough to keep it germinating for some time now.

Does this happen to you? You feel something…you hear something…you go through something that excites and encompasses your body and mind…and then you notice a word or meet a person or, in some way, discover tangible signs about this thing you’re feeling or hearing? One can attribute all kinds of motivations for these occurrences…but it happens to me all.the.time. And it’s like, I can’t let it go or let it not affect my mind and body in such a big way, until I gather all the signs and pay attention to them…and discover what I can learn from them.

For me, suffering is a teacher. A strict, strident, stiff being who lives in the body that is my classroom. When I envision it – it is gendered. It is a she. I can see her body…she has dark hair pulled into a bun so tightly wrapped at the back of her head, her skin is translucent. She doesn’t have a face.

I’ve made contact with her during therapy sessions…while writing poetry…or entries in my journal. She is busy right now, and she’s called in her siblings, cousins, her whole damn family, to knock the knuckles of our heart hands with her cold, metal ruler. Suffering wants to be in all the classrooms, knocking all the hearts, and usurping the body to bend and buckle into the trickery of believing that the darkness is painful, bad, and stronger than the light.

Now, okay, this is all very metaphorical…and perhaps my penchant for poetry is pushing its way into the language…I will let it. Because, poetry is a mirror for suffering. The chalkboard, if I take hold of the classroom that is my body, I can change into a mirror.

I had a vision, led by my dear friend and wise-sister Erinn (thank you, sister!), and I was zoomed back into my childhood bedroom, complete with bunkbeds, dresser and small wooden table (with two chairs, and a sweet but scratched illustration of lambs in a flower field on the top) in their places. Also, my self, aged 4-years-old. She was alone, sitting on one of the chairs. I (my grown-up self) took a seat on the bottom bunk. Little Me looked at Grown-up Me. We stared at each other. She said: This, our suffering, is mandatory.

I listened as my brain exploded taking in her words. And our teacher, Ms. Suffering, did a slow, sarcastic clap as she strutted alive in my body.

Little Me also said: You are the mother you always wanted.

That one turned my brain into stardust. I wept in real-life and in the vision. Ms. Suffering shrunk, and spider crawled into a hiding place.

I had this vision about two weeks ago and it plays in my movie-mind on repeat.

This, our suffering, is mandatory. You are the mother you always wanted.

This morning, this showed up, when I did a card pull requesting guidance on how to quell my fear about the world – politics, economy, environment…

Divine Feminine Oracle Deck

“The dark has been so vilified yet, all life emerges from the pitch-black womb. The darkness is potential; it is the crucial and elemental stage we must all go through to create new or more life…The body has wisdom. The earth has wisdom. And the pain we experience as humans contains deep wisdom….It can be almost impossible to accept or notice the presence of the divine when we are at our most human…There is no darkness we can enter without being met by love…”

Meggan Watterson, with illustrations by Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman

Being human…being alive in energy that flows in a body…that energy of bone and muscle and cells, wrapped in skin so strong it has seven damn layers, an organ that is in constant holding of all that our bodies are made of…if, as John O’Donohue writes…”the body is in the soul”…then what is suffering? It is not a bone or a muscle or a cell. It is not an organ. Is it a dis-ease? An emotional response to trying to get back to our soul energy – without a body?

This is what I’ve been extremely curious about.

This curiosity is penetrating my creativity. It is expressing itself in my poetry and journals and here, with you, and I don’t want to be afraid to share it…because, I think, that’s what Ms. Suffering wants. She wants to alienate, to isolate, to exacerbate the body from the soul through pain…or disagreement or blame or comparing…

I think it’s dangerous to compare our suffering. I think comparing is a dis-ease of the body’s desire to stay connected to its soul. I think the soul is love. I think that love is equal light and dark…and in this way, there is a relationship between dark and light…between suffering and joy. I think that both are inevitable in human bodies. But to hold up pain and call it anything other than a way into the light, than a way back to love…is where we get stuck in our body…is how we forget…what we are… I think it is entirely, utterly difficult to remember this…because when we are ‘most human’ – that is, when we are really suffering…how can we ‘be’ anything else? We are consumed with trying not to continue suffering – at all costs. Internal costs. External costs. Spiritual costs. We forget what it’s like to be in our mother’s wombs. That is the grand forgetting…but the body, the cells, they remember.

I think it’s dangerous to compare our suffering, to gage it as ‘worse than’ another’s…because measuring one pain against another is defying the fact that each IS in pain, that each IS suffering. No matter how far I follow this conversation about suffering with all my parts…all the way down…I go, I go, I go…I find my ‘self’ – a singular united collective – in Love’s den.

If we all suffer, and suffering is a teacher, and each body suffers by virtue of be-ing human…and suffering is dark…and there is equal light to dark…and out of darkness is light…and light is love…the spiral dervishes into love again and again. And this is not a belief in the negation of pain, that diseases are not real, that the lived experiences of a body as ‘able’ or ‘disable’ is untrue – no! All of this is true. I am a living body that experiences suffering and pain on a daily basis…and if not exact pain, then the fear of it lighting up…which can be as terrifying and debilitating.

What I’m swirling inside of is what is suffering? How does it exist in my body and mind? How does it exist in the world around me? In other bodies around me? Do we all have a Ms. Suffering as one of our parts? How can suffering be massive as in a war where thousands of humans die each day, as in epidemics and pandemics, as in the kind of language cruelty that is emotional and verbal abuse, as in racism, as in hate? How can suffering be so small as in a part of DNA, as in a cell, as in the silence of betrayal, as in a lie…? What is suffering if not a mandatory part of be-ing human that my 4-year-old self was able to articulate…and choose, and that, as a result, my grown-up self is something my little self suffered into being…? The mother I always wanted to have…I mean, I can’t write this without weeping at the impact this singe sentence has on the make-up of who I am. It has…re-arranged me.

I’m in the middle of recognizing what it means to acknowledge the Ms. Suffering in my mind, her relationship to my body, and how I can choose to respond to it now…as an adult. As a human who can see and feel and contemplate the ‘mandatory’-ness of suffering…or the freedom of it as it relates to love.

What does any of this have to do with writing?

I think that…it has been through my love of reading and my passion for writing that any of this contemplation is possible. My littlest self loved to read and write. My story, the one I keep writing and poem-ing, over and over, is about love. Does any love story exist without some kind of pain or suffering? I think…yes…but that is the First Story. The Soul Story. And…at this point in my body…in my writing life…these two forces are calling out to each other. They are meeting in the reds of my spasming guts. They are meeting in the tightening of my lower back muscles. They are meeting in my peri-menopausal belly. They are meeting on the page, on the screen, in therapy, in my dreams…I cannot escape…and I don’t want to…this mandatory exchange between suffering and joy.

And it relates to being published or not. A rejection can be painful. And I’ve felt the pain of it over and over. But I’m learning to feel rejection differently. I’m learning to love more deeply the process of the writing, the courage to submit…and the new narrative that a rejection is a surrender…and a surrender is a chance to begin again.

I’m eager to continue discovering the new narrative that my 4-year-old self and my grown-up self can have a re-arranged, a re-imagined, a re-vised relationship with suffering. That perhaps it’s possible to surrender the suffering for my 4-year-old self, in that bedroom, on that day…that she can release the story of suffering she thought was ‘mandatory’…and simply go outside and play. And read. And write. And love.