All Happiness Is Alike; Each Pain Is Different in Its Own Way
Or, when I speak about “my own pain” and about “another person’s pain,” I’m speaking about two wholly distinct orders of events
I make my own dinner. I hate it. With all my heart! My cook comes in the morning. She cuts the vegetables. All I have to do is take them out of the fridge, put some chicken pieces into them (which by the way are already cut and cleaned) and mix it with some masala and salt, preheat the oven, put the items in it, then wait precisely for seventeen and half minutes (well, I put the raw items into the oven well before it’s done preheating; this saves time). This sounds simple, but I despise doing it. Every. Single. Evening.
I’ve got a tiny bit of undiagnosed ADHD. These days it’s been acting up. I usually keep it under control via exercise, routine, and discipline (all boring yet extremely important stuff that allow me to function like a “normal” human being, without a storm raging in my head all the time). But on some days it sneaks out of my control and spins up a twister inside my head. I don’t look forward to those days fondly.
The characteristic of ADHD is inattention. When my ADHD has an upper hand it’s nearly impossible to concentrate. On anything. Whenever I start doing something, there’s a voice in my head that goes on listing the things that I HAVE to be doing, but which are not getting done BECAUSE I’m wasting my time and energy and attention in this USELESS task that I’m currently doing (no matter how important this task actually is).
What’s the result of all this? I don’t get up to make dinner. I don’t even get up to drink water; even pee. I get nothing done actually. The moment I even think of getting up, yet another voice in my head starts to whisper: “You are wasting precious time by attending to nature’s calls1 while important things are left undone. Shame on you!” The result is nothing but a complete paralysis of productivity.
Just imagine a mind that never stops running. A bunch of thoughts just swirling around in it, like a dance. Each idea twirls before making room for the next one. All within a split of a second! In such a mind’s theatre, scenes change with rapid unpredictability, usually out of sequence. Imagine the scenes of several movies taken apart, jumbled up, and then put together, playing at 10x speed. Inside your head. All the time. Letting you NOT do anything else.
For someone who doesn’t have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), or GAD (General Anxiety Disorder), or OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), or godforbid, severe depression, it’s nearly impossible to convey what it actually feels like to experience it.2
Language doesn’t have the right words to convey what it’s like to endure pain and suffering. That’s why we rely on metaphors. But as much as I talk about the “voices in my head,” apart from me (or perhaps someone who has experienced it firsthand), no one would really know what it actually is like to have voices in your head.
This one time my cousin, when he was just a kid, was bitten by an ant. After he told me what happened, he said, “It hurt like this,” and then he pinched me. He was trying to shrink the space between his pain and my understanding of it, and language just wouldn’t suffice. Not because he was six, but because language is always inadequate in the face of pain.
The writer Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain: “The very temptation to invoke analogies … is itself a sign of pain’s triumph, for it achieves its aversiveness in part by bringing about, even within the radius of several feet, this absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons.”
When I speak about “my own pain” and about “another person’s pain,” I’m actually speaking about two wholly distinct orders of entities. If it’s my pain, I comprehend it without even trying. It’s crystal clear because, well, it’s happening in my own body and I’m experiencing it first hand. In fact, I cannot NOT be able to grasp it even with the best of efforts.
But if I’m looking at someone else going through pain, even if I really try to understand it, what I understand is just a sliver of what they’re actually feeling. It’s like trying to see the whole picture, but you can only catch a blurry glimpse of only a part of the picture. Even if I successfully apprehend it someone else’s pain, the apprehended “it” is will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual “it”.
For a person who is in pain, “having pain” means “having certainty.” But for someone else, “hearing about pain” equates to “having doubt.” Pain is kind of a mysterious thing that’s “impossible to ignore” by the person going through it, but also “impossible to understand” if you’re not the one experiencing it.
Leo Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This stands true when it comes to feelings of happiness and pain as well. “All happiness is alike; each pain and suffering is different in its own way.”
So when I tell someone why sometimes it’s super hard for me to get up and make dinner, or even drink water, or pee, at worst they might not understand the problem at all — that’s where platitudes such as, “do it, don’t think about it so much,” or “it’s okay to be NOT good at all the things you do, what’s important is you do them well,” come into the picture3 — and at best they can acknowledge that what it’s like to get things done for someone who has ADHD is very different from what it’s like to get things done for someone who does NOT have ADHD. To expect anything more is futile!
“English,” writes the writer Virginia Woolf, “which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache. The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”
This is true for all languages, not just English. Pain doesn’t just make it hard to talk about; it actually destroys language. When you’re in pain, it’s like you go back to a time before you had even learnt words. You make sounds that babies make before they know how to talk. Pain sort of takes us back to a more basic way of expressing ourselves, where words don’t quite cut it. We express with grunts, and howls, and cries, and wails instead.
Around 93% of all humans die from disease. A phenomenon so common that we attribute these deaths to natural causes. And one thing that all diseases have in common is pain. It’s strange that we don’t have the right language for something that’s so common.
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings … it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” laments Virginia Woolf yet again. I mean, it’s just mind boggling when you realise that diseases have killed more people than have wars — both of which cause tremendous mental and physical pain.4
Though the capacity to experience physical pain is as primal a fact about the human being as is the capacity to hear, to touch, to desire, to fear, to hunger, it differs from these events, and from every other bodily and psychic event, by not having an object in the external world.
Hearing and touch are of objects outside the boundaries of the body, as desire is desire of x, fear is fear of y, hunger is hunger for z; but pain is not of or for anything — it is itself alone.
This lack of a clear object makes it hard to put pain into words. Pain doesn’t easily connect with something outside of us, like other feelings do.
When you desire something, say the latest iPhone, you can visualise it, or point towards it to a friend, and they’ll instantly know you’re longing for it. You’re on a mission to hit the store and get a good deal you’re hungry for, before the offer runs out, which you fear.
Other feelings are tied to the things around us, but pain doesn’t express itself that way. It’s kind of like a feeling without a clear connection to the outside world. It doesn’t have things to focus on.
The only other state that is as ambiguous as pain is imagination. Just like pain, when you imagine, there’s no separate feeling. Both pain and imagination consists only of the things that are in it. There’s no external reference, which makes it completely invisible and almost impossible to communicate.
The lack of language to talk about and express pain is one of the reasons mental illness has been misunderstood for so long. As the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein conjectured: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
For a species that is completely dependent upon the power of prose to start a revolution, to bring about a change, and in general to make things happen, I feel this handicap is the reason we cannot exercise the full potential of our empathy. Because, if you don’t understand someone’s pain, how can you be on the same wavelength with them?
That’s why, for a long while, we’ve been using words such as “mad,” “insane,” or “crazy,” and phrases such, “you’re imagining this,” “all this is inside your head,” to label those we don’t understand instead of acknowledging the very fact that we actually don’t understand their state of mind.
Just because someone is imagining things, or are hearing voices, or are feeling low despite there being nothing particularly wrong, it doesn’t make it any less true for them. This is something we must acknowledge. Like the Philip Larkin poem says: “We should be careful. Of each other, we should be kind. While there is still time.”
The need to eat or drink or pee are all nature’s calls.
Freud described depression as “aggression turned inward.” Without actually experiencing it, it’s almost impossible to make sense of depression.
All platitudes are invented by people who don’t know they don’t know what they are talking about.
While wars have been responsible for a considerable number of deaths, especially in the 20th century with events like World War I and World War II, diseases have historically had a more consistent and pervasive impact on global populations over time.