Your Suffering is the Least Interesting Thing About You

Suffering is a Given.
What are you doing with it?
That is the issue at hand.

At the first-principles scale, Suffering is non-specific and indistinguishable.
There are no prizes for “Most Traumatized” or “Worst Case Scenario”.
I like to describe this as the “Function” level of Suffering.
Its complement, the “Content” level, is where we get to play and chew on individuality and distinctions.
The Content of Suffering may look like:
My husband of 30 years just disclosed 32 years of infidelity.
A lung cancer diagnosis.
Being harassed by police because of racial biases.
Going to bed hungry.
Falling down and scraping your knee.
Your ice-cream falling off the cone and plopping onto the sidewalk.

If you find yourself in the throes of your discriminating mind and wonder if it’s even loosely appropriate to lump these together on the same list, I might (in a more audacious moment) propose that perhaps you have so drastically distanced yourself from your own emotions or memories that you fail to remember as a child you surely sobbed and wailed for all of Humanity when you forgot to hold on to your balloon and it floated away. You may not be able, or you may be consciously choosing to refuse, to remember how you moaned and shrieked and rolled about on the floor while pounding your fists because it’s time to leave the house, or to return to the house. You may not remember your own chaotic boiling associated with simply being told it’s time to brush your teeth and get in your bed. But you will assuredly feel it again someday, consciously, and with achingly profound and undeniable awareness.

As children, the Content of Suffering is effectively irrelevant. Perceptual experience is so fresh and raw that nearly every single phenomenon that pings us at all feels like either a revelation of ecstasy and joy, or a personalized catastrophe of greeting cards from Hell. With the passing of time and the accrual of more and more experience, we typically find that we become less reactionary to some of the common Sufferings of being Human. Bedtime, whether tragically or miraculously, comes day after day. We discover that we will leave home, and return to it, many times (barring drastic cases of agoraphobia and similar circumstances) for both exciting and mundane reasons. In this manner, we gradually lose touch with the realization that Suffering is so utterly rampant. Call it “developing tolerance” or chalk it up to some form of desensitization, growing thicker skin, getting used to it. In any case, after constant exposure to the many permutations of Suffering available to us, in time it takes ever more grandiose forms of Content to rekindle that raw and unrestrained recognition of Human Suffering. See the items at the top of our short list of potential devastation.

All of this is just to suggest that there is nothing impressive or laudable, nothing uniquely tragic or important, about your experience of Suffering. No matter how extreme the degree, or extensive the breadth of the Content, the Function level of your Suffering reduces to “On” or “Off” (and, of course, from a Buddhist perspective it is definitively always on). While it is valuable to acknowledge the specifics of that which we individually suffer at the level of Content, it is a decidedly predictable and brief game to play unless we’re utterly dedicated to our misery.

At the risk of sounding harsh, the only response I can authentically offer to someone who might risk the vulnerability of sharing their tale of Suffering is this: So what?
So. What.
?
What now?
What for?
What do you want me to do, then?
What do you need?

The fact of our Suffering is not interesting, it’s obvious and built-in to the Human experience.
The Content of our Suffering is, at best, vaguely compelling as flavoring and insofar as it stokes the Egoic flames of ownership and possession.
That flavoring is really just an indication that something is there.
The Content is proof of the Function.

So, you’re suffering.
So is everyone who exists, will exist, and has existed.
That’s not a statement of deflection or dismissal, and literally not one of denial, despite how it often is perceived.
So you’re suffering.
So What?
So what are you doing with your Suffering?
So what are you doing about the fact of Suffering?
How does it make you move?
How does it dare you to laugh?
How does it allow you to cry?
How does it demand that you heal?

Everyone has the Suffering.
It is the manner in which we relate with it that affords us an opportunity to be uniquely interesting.
The Art of Life is the way we confront, embrace, and transmute the fact of Suffering.

When the Suffering demands that we discover a Joy and Peace far more pervasive than it in order to continue to exist, we can trust that we have truly begun to live. When we do discover our greater Joy, our more profound Peace, then we begin to see Suffering as it actually is. We no longer enshrine the details of our misery, though we certainly still could. When we begin to appreciate Suffering at the level of Function it loses some of its luster and sharpness, yet it grows in its quantity and magnitude. The focus is no longer “MY” Suffering but becomes “THE” Suffering, of which there is undeniably no shortage. The crystal clarity and keen focus of “my” precious Suffering gives way to the dull and pervasive thrum of “the” Suffering across time, and spanning generations. It is undeniably present, but in essence it’s merely a blank canvas. Our particular instance of Life, this specific and distinct experience of being alive, is an opportunity to paint. Let Suffering compel you toward something Joyful, toward genuine Peace. Not merely running from Suffering, but a Joy and Peace so profound that you find yourself utterly willing, and maybe even authentically receptive to walking through the Suffering.

Your Suffering is the least interesting thing about you.
Tell me about your Joy.
Tell me about your Passion.
Suffering is not unique.
It is a dull throb undergirding our entire existence.
What have you found which is more compelling than that boring ache?
If you have yet to discover your answer,
then you cannot afford to worship at the Idol of your Suffering one single breath longer.