I.

The only thing worse than being pitied is people thinking you want to be pitied. Which is why when, upon immediately interpreting the theme of this issue—“Secrets”—to mean “Pain,” I found myself at an impasse. It has now been over a week of me staring at a blank document, watching my cursor blink, and becoming increasingly frustrated at my lack of output. Any sentence that I managed to type out was quickly deleted—sentences that were usually an attempt to circumvent accusations of self-victimization. Before even knowing what I wanted to say about pain, I knew that I needed a caveat: I know that there is nothing unique, interesting, or special about my pain. Yet, still, I am writing about it. Thus, I now need a second caveat: I know that self-awareness does not equal absolution.

As I watched the article deadline loom nearer and pass by, I began to question why I associated  “secrets” with “pain” in the first place; since my aversion to writing about pain is precisely due to how ordinary the topic is. I have read numerous books and essays and poems that speak about pain far more eloquently than I ever could. I have sat through countless creative writing workshops where pain was probed ad nauseam. Choosing to write about pain as a woman does not feel like a revelation. It feels like a cliché. So what makes pain a secret? 

Maybe pain is a secret because it is invisible. Even pains that are marked on my body, my cuts and burns and bruises, can be seen by others but felt only by me. The worst pains, pains of the mind and the heart and the spirit, are doubly invisible. There are no physical markings I can display as evidence of my suffering. Maybe pain is a secret because, despite my deep-rooted fear of being predictable, I still think my pain matters. Maybe pain is a secret because I care about it more than I’d like. Maybe pain is a secret because I actually believe there is something special about my pain that deserves to be shared, or maybe pain is a secret because I really wish I could believe that there is something special about my pain, anything that deserves to be written about at all. Maybe pain is a secret because I have a kneejerk disdain towards women who write about pain, which I’m worried makes me a misogynist, or maybe pain is a secret because it is the only thing that makes me feel worthy of being a woman at all. 

My repulsion to writing about pain is, of course, nothing unique. In her essay, Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, Leslie Jamison writes about a phenomenon she calls “post-woundedness,” describing contemporary women’s compulsion to coat our pain in several layers of irony and self-reflexivity, lest we be accused of playing the overwrought and exhausted role of a melodramatic woman. Post-wounded women know that earnest displays of hurt beget accusations not only of self-absorption but also of playing into the tired stereotype of a helpless, powerless, and/or histrionic woman, a stereotype that has been fetishized ad nauseum in centuries of art and literature. So, Jamison writes, “Feeling sorry for ourselves has become a secret crime, a kind of shameful masturbation that would chase away the sympathy of others if we ever let it show.” 

I say that I am petrified of being predictable, but the post-wounded affect is the status quo for twenty-first century women of my milieu (urban, wanting to be taken seriously). The fact is that a wound won’t disappear just because we acknowledge the banality of the wound’s existence. Women’s—or anyone’s—pain might be unoriginal and unremarkable, but it is still pain. Pain that has felt unbearable to others is still pain that feels unbearable to me. Perhaps the truly radical stance is to accept that the ubiquity and repetitiveness of overwhelming pain is precisely what makes it worthy of sustained artistic and intellectual exploration. 

II.

It has now been a week since I wrote the introduction to this article. Again, I have typed and deleted thousands of words, all of them maddeningly inadequate for everything I want to express; about the arbitrary nature of pain, the symbolic meaning we imbue it with anyway, times that I have been hurt so predictably I became embarrassed for getting hurt at all, times that I have felt pain so consuming and intense that I actually believed the pain was unprecedented even though I know it was not, and the purpose of writing about pain in all its banality and misguided romanticism. This article now feels like an embarrassing copout—I had something I wanted to say but I couldn’t figure out how to say it and now you are reading me lament about my fruitless attempts to develop a treatise on pain. I still want to leave you with something beyond woeful meta-commentary; so, here is a bullet point list of various half-baked thoughts/confessions relating to where this article could go if I had more time/was a better writer/resisted the urge to compulsively edit each sentence immediately after typing it:

• When I found out my ex-boyfriend cheated on me, my first thought was I have never felt more like a woman than I do right now.

• I genuinely do not believe my pain is interesting, but I think it is easy for me to believe in the mundanity of my pain because there are others who believe in its significance on my behalf. When I received my psychiatric diagnosis, medical professionals told me that my psyche confirms a creative disposition. That I suffer from a true artist’s affliction. I am not sure if they meant it as an apology—I’m sorry that your brain is determined to destroy you and that you must be medicated for the rest of your life for just a semblance of stability, but Vincent Van Gogh painted Starry Night and maybe you can too!—or if they genuinely believe that insanity breeds artistic genius. Probably a little bit of both. 

• I am not so cynical as to completely distrust men, but I am cynical enough that I self-flagellate for feeling hurt when men hurt me in entirely obvious and foreseeable ways. Like when a guy I was very briefly seeing verbatim texted me “I am a poor communicator” and I proceeded to be sad when he was poor at communicating. Or when a guy I was having a casual tryst with told me that he finds me interesting and intelligent as a person beyond our sexual relationship and would still want to know my opinions on art and literature and philosophy once our tryst subsided, and I naïvely believed him.

• In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag wrote of the mythical (and ultimately detrimental) meaning ascribed to diseases and forms of suffering. Regarding sadness, she said: “Sadness made one ‘interesting.’ It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad.” Interesting to be sad—I don’t know if it is anymore. I think it might be, for the girlblogging crowd, for girls who curate their sadness to appeal to other girls. (Girlbloggers: girls who perform sadness, girls who dwell in it. Girls who still believe their rose-tinted melancholy is sexualized by the external voyeur). When I come across a poem about rape expressed through metaphors of deer, ribbons, pomegranates, and figs, I instinctually want to grab these girls and plead: You’re more than this! You’re better than this! Yet, I get defensive when someone accuses these girls of dwelling to their detriment or embellishing a pain that is passé. The origins of their wounds are inflicted, not imagined. I think that our society still subconsciously subscribes to the mythos that true suffering guarantees artistic profundity, and thus these girlblogging wound-dwellers who narrate themselves through molding strawberries and Blythe dolls must be histrionic. I am not arguing that art is interesting just because it emerges from horrific suffering—I think a lot of art about pain is proasic, across the gender spectrum. But I think that our society’s impulse to conflate mediocre art with mediocre suffering is the true detriment. As Jamison wrote, “pain that is performed is still pain.”

• I do not believe that pain makes me weak but I do believe that pain makes me virtuous. I believe that suffering is meaningless and arbitrary but I also (shamefully) believe that suffering is a test of moral character. Shame and guilt are the easiest emotions for me to access. Catholicism is appealing to me.

• My primary connection to womanhood is pain, which makes me feel like a bad feminist. I wonder if my impatience with women who center pain in their art/writing subconsciously functions as my version of atonement. 

• Last month I was walking on Rue Drolet and listening to Belle and Sebastian and as I passed by a house that I like—with violet finishing on its gable and an alternate colour Canadiens flag on its porch—I started thinking about how I will be sad forever. Not always, but forever. Sometimes it will come in waves and sometimes it will come in ripples. Sometimes it will shelter my heart like a cashmere blanket and it will make me feel safe, like a reminder that I still exist even when nobody is touching me. I think I’m still attached to the story that my pain is particularly incomprehensible, because I think I’m scared to lose a part of me that nobody understands.