Pain Is Not a Penance

On our unexamined assumptions about pain, character, cause and effect, etymologies, and what we do to each other when we cannot stop hurting

So I looked up the etymology of the word pain the other day.

I don't know if this is a TED Talk or the opening to a Letterkenny episode, but either way, I can feel a black turtleneck and discreet-but-not-really headset and/or a plaid flannel shirt and deeply unfortunate bangs spontaneously sprouting from my skin as I type this.

But I can't really stop thinking about it, idly, at the beginning of this day or the end of that one.

It's not so odd, really, and it's not just a vaguely organic way to begin an essay. Etymologies are both fun and something that comes up a lot as a writer with a linguistics background...but really I just wondered. I hadn't ever really thought about it, where we get our word for pain, simple pain, that common thread of all of us living on a ball of water in space.

I knew agony without looking it up. It's Greek, agonia, a struggle, related to the word agon, which refers to the part of the play when two characters argue strongly against one another. It's also where we get the roots of the words protagonist and antagonist. Hurt I dimly remembered coming from the same root as hurtle, Old French for striking, ramming, or colliding with something. Grief from the Latin for a great weight.

I'm not sure what I expected to find for plain old pain, honestly. I'm not sure why I was looking it up. Things have been hard, it's a year that's called for a re-evaluation of a lot of things I thought were unchangeable, unmitigatable, maybe even unhealable, but that certainly was never helped by knowing which dead language barfed up a root-syllable vaguely related to how I've been feeling.

But here it is anyway, because, small as it may be, what I found was a lot to take in, and I've had to sit with it a good while. I have this weird feeling it might be important.

Pain comes from the Latin, because of course it does. Specifically, it comes from the Latin word poena, which means penance, or punishment, or retribution. And further back that word relates to Greek, because of course it does. The Greek word poine, which means all those things but also literally blood-money, the gold you pay in penance for spilling the blood of another.

Not to put too fine an ancient point on it, but jesus fucking christ.

My first thought was: well, that tracks.

It's all through our culture. Most cultures. It's not even one you can just lay at the feet of whatever the West is and saunter on. It's all through multiple major religions, not all of them even Abrahamic. It's all through our media, the marrow of the bones of our whole narrative sensibility, the pulsing iron core of the just world fallacy, and while it's super fun to blame western culture for everything we're doing poorly in the here and now, this one is just a whole lot bigger than that.

The world we move through, even if we don't say it (but lots of people say it) or think it consciously (but lots of people think it consciously) or act on it (but lots of people act on it) or even understand that some old, angry, beaten, fearful part of us assumes it (but..), treats pain as though it must be a punishment. For something you've done, something you've been, something you failed to do, something you wanted, chose, strove for, resisted, something you couldn't stop, something you turned away from or turned toward or turned into, something you gave in to, something you saw or didn't see, something you lost or took or abandoned or wouldn't let go.

The philosophical version of this is karma, or the rule of three, or the Sermon on the Mount, or whatever semi-organized semi-religious what goes around comes around epistemological scaffolding you want to lay against the horrifying fiery tenement building of human misery. And if you follow that logic, that pain always arises from bad actions on the part of the person in agony and the universe's apparently near-pathological need to say no, fuck you, you end up with this wretched ourobouros choking and sobbing on that poor battered tail, blood streaming from between its fangs as it bites down harder and harder and hurts more and more but it can't ever stop, doesn't even know how to stop, because you cannot act perfectly when you're in deep pain, no one can. Round and around the bad snake goes, all the way back to Original Sin, all of us just trading Adam's transgression among ourselves like a collector's card whose value is nothing and everything.

The commercial version is The Secret.

But it's the same festering, cruel, pernicious idea.

Pain is payback. You earned this hurt. It didn't happen to you, you collided with it. It isn't random, it is your pain, for you, because of you, and if you'd only been better, if only you'd been stronger, if only you'd held on a little longer or let go a little sooner, if only you'd been more, if only you'd been less, if only you'd managed to be Goldilocks' Own Brand Pristinely Precisely Perfect Fucking Porridge, you wouldn't be doubled over in the dark right now, burning alive from the inside out.

It's so deep and bears so many ugly, brutal fruits. So ugly and so brutal that everything else I'm about to write in these next few paragraph makes me physically sick to type out. Because it's all in there, in that one word. If someone is in pain, it must be their own fault, so helping them is actually morally wrong. It upsets the balance of the universe. The other side of pain-is-penance is lack-of-pain-is-reward. We who are not in that specific type of pain are superior to those who are; we are not lucky, we are #blessed. If they are not in pain, what was the purpose of our supposed virtue? Me and My Wife didn't deny our every authentic longing and emotion for nothin'! And if you work pretty hard at it, you can totally convince Me and My Wife that the specific pain we do experience isn't pain at all, in fact, it's awesome to be free to have no healthcare or retirement or prospects or safety net, and we'll hurt anyone who tries to take that away! And they'll deserve it!

But those others? They have to suffer, don't you know, or else they'll never learn. The idea that pain is elevating, instructional, cleansing, that "character" can never be forged by positive experience, only by grueling torment, is all tangled up in poena, poena, poena, pain as punishment, pain as penance and correction. Oh no, you see, it's not the history of slavery in this country followed by decade upon decade of Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, lynching, white terrorism, and legislative malpractice, it's their culture. Chronic illness and invisible disabilities aren't just things that can happen to anyone, they're just lazy and weak and greedy and probably lying anyway. It's not hatred, discrimination, exclusion, and murder that makes the trans suicide and depression rate so high, they did it to themselves by choosing to be trans (and they're probably lying anyway). In fact, perpetuating pain is a good deed that will result in a better future. Me and My Wife aren't just selfish cruel greedy fuckfaucets, we're HELPING!

Even people's extremely widespread discomfort with pain relief during childbirth (or any gynecological procedure, or frankly, any pain a woman reports at all) speaks to a tacit understanding that any suffering is, on some level, deserved. She had sex, didn't she? She's a woman, isn't she? If she were a perfect granola-blooded breastmilk elemental, it wouldn't hurt at all...

Ugh. I need a shower.

And all this is why people hyperfocus on victims' behavior instead of the crime itself. Not to solve the crime or find the perpetrators, not to prevent it happening to others in the future or figure out why it keeps happening to anyone at all. Nah, none of that matters. It's to get their feet back under them, to keep believing, for another handful of milliseconds, that this is in fact a just world, a bizarre Calvinist RPG in which debuffs stack ferociously and the winners were chosen before the startup screen illuminated the faceless void. That there is somehow a path, a way, through this great galactic garbage patch without pain, if only you act perfectly without fail and also perfectly as defined by all possible worldviews, and yes, you must fulfill all of them at the same time and still go to work in the morning and you better look smart doing it.

What was she wearing? Did he have a criminal record? What were they even doing in that neighborhood? Why didn't she leave sooner? I would have left. How did people not know? I would have known. She probably drank too much. I would never drink too much. He shouldn't have taken a step toward that cop. I've never had a problem with cops. He must have had pre-existing conditions, they chose to eat like that, she was probably cheating anyway, those bootstraps were right there, he could have pulled them up any time, that's what happens if you do a drug, ever, any kind. All those kids were probably bullying him, she shouldn't have vaccinated her children, they should have picked a better partner, they should have picked a more lucrative major 30 years ago, they shouldn't have/should have had kids. Well gosh darn it, he/she/they should have figured out how to be born white, cis, straight, and neurotypical into a supportive family environment that prioritized education and grown up in a good school district with every resource available to them if they didn't want to die starving in that ditch over yonder all us upstanding folk call the Starving Ditch on account of how often people seem to actively choose to climb into it and never ever choose to climb out for some mysterious reason. I managed just fine, what's the problem?

What did you do to draw the evil eye?

And none of this, none of this makes any actual sense. Not least because even the people who conduct their lives according to the strictures of an overly-optimistic 1991 Christian college code of conduct still have bad things happen to them all the fucking time. Really bad things! They still suffer, they still cry at night, their bodies still fail them, they still lose their loved ones, they're still afraid and alone sometimes, they still get fucking hurt. None of that magical thinking actually works. You can wear just the right garments and ingest only the purest mountain spring water and say the ritual words once a week and monogamously marry your soulmate and have many quite tidy heteronormative children at developmentally-appropriate intervals and buy crypto eight years ago and make friends with all your local police-humans and never ever go out at night and still get fucking bodied by life. Straight into a highway median. And everyone knows that, but we don't want to know it, because it's viscerally, existentially horrific and we all need to get something done by end of business today.

And don't think this isn't what's behind the sudden uptick in online "tradwife" nonsense, either. Oh, maybe if I just completely sublimate my soul into a fucking seafoam-green vintage oven and never stop looking so suspiciously young that glow on my cheekbones might in fact be amniotic fluid and never speak up or ask for anything for myself and never complain and never say no and never burn the casserole and never make him angry and never stop smiling and never have anything so vulgar as an orgasm and worship the first man who looked at me I will never have to face the pain of living in the actual world under capitalism, technocracy, patriarchy, and other scary words! It'll probably work, so anyone who does anything different deserves misery. And after all, why not force everyone to do it so I don't have to feel weird about my choices even once and I can avoid even that slight pain of wondering if maybe there was any other way through this vale of sparkling instagram tear-filters? What do you mean he cheated and I have four kids and no work history? But I followed all the rules...

It's just a fawning response to trauma (Ancient Greek, trauma, a word so big it never changed one little letter from then to now, language to language, a piercing, twisting wound, a hurt, a damage, especially of or pertaining to ships at sea). And there's always trauma, but the world is frightening and immense and impossible for any individual to control or even fully understand, and the shadows lengthening on the horizons of everyone in the Starving Ditch sure seem to promise perfect self-abnegating housewives will be spared. We don't all fight or fly. Sometimes we praise a god from our first breath to our last, hoping for protection, for grace, for any shelter from the random chaos that actually wears the crown of this cosmos. Sometimes we can't find one and we praise the nearest human who promises to stand between us and pain. Sometimes we can't find either, and for those, well, people like the Sacklers are waiting. Which sounds like a glib joke, but it isn't. Humans simply cannot stop with the opiates, not from the first cavelady who asked: what that poppy do? Well, Uggna, my love, that poppy takes pain away. Until it doesn't. And from now until forever, humanity is going to mess itself right up over it because we all just hurt too much, most of the time, to not take the pretty flower sitting right there promising peace.

And yet, I've done it too. Right there in that italicized paragraph. Blamed my little imaginary conservative broom-bunny for the very real pain of abandonment, financial disaster, and helplessness in a grinding world with little enough grace to go around. There's plenty of people for whom that arrangement works fine til death do they part, hurt and loss and betrayal is not actually a direct moral result of traditional gender roles, even if you're using that frilly apron to hide some very nasty propaganda. Correlation, maybe, but not causation.

It only gets weirder when we get down into the sock-layers of the well-worn but truly rubbish suitcase we've decided to unpack together of a Thursday. Because we are all in pain. Sometimes less, sometimes more, sometimes hardly any, sometimes so intense we cannot stand. Even in the best playthrough of life on Planet Earth, we are born screaming and eventually gasp and shatter and sicken and die. Our parents die. Our spouses. Our friends. Sometimes our children. And the things we do when we are in pain are sometimes terrible. We lash out, we grow bitter, it leaks out of us even when we try so hard to be better. If we inflict pain on others, does that mean they're being punished, too? Does that mean the terrible things we do are forgiven, because the cosmically-ordained pain has to come from somewhere? Me and My Wife up there surely think so, even if they might not put it in exactly those words. Where does this trash-ass daisy chain end? Where does it begin? I'm not going to entertain any of that original sin clownshit, but making sense of any of this is exactly where that comes from, because it's hard to think your shitty just-world thoughts around the fact that brand-new infants suffer and die without having so much as cut off someone in traffic. Oh don't worry, you don't have to stay up late freaking out about that, surely their parents did something to deserve the pain of their children...and once you can believe that and communicate it with word or deed, you're well on your way to becoming the etymology of someone else's pain.

And if each pain is assumed to be an equal and opposite reaction, it really does become that wheel of suffering people have been on about for a few millennia. A grotesque country dance of unhappiness where each verse tells us we brought it on ourselves. And if I hurt Nathan because Susan hurts me because Gary hurt Susan because Bob hurt Gary because Bob's dad was a real piece of shit because Bob's dad's dad murdered a whole bunch of people in a war and couldn't get cool with it because literally no one in government's parents loved them enough to make them feel alive without war and back and back and back...are we all just trading around the same pain, believing we deserve it, that others deserve it, hand to hand all the way back to Eve (Eden or mitochondrial) or Tiamat or the first cell to divide? Or did only that primal cell deserve it, and we've just kept its pain going like a chain letter from hell over all the eons of the world? How bad is the pain, little cell? With one being the unthinking totality of your lost wholeness and ten being the depthless chasm of unquenchable regret that formed when you ripped yourself in half for the sake of time and sequential action and the pyramids and Pythagoras and plagues and parliaments and poppies and penny dreadfuls and us?

All I can give you is ibuprofen so buckle up

When I cut Bill off in traffic this morning, was I passing along a tiny microscopic sliver of that original pain, a sliver that will return to me this afternoon or tomorrow or next year?

Well, no. Fucking no. This thing is a worm eating at the roots of our whole civilization, a set of contradictory algorithms that constantly throws out errors but we can't quite remove. Pain is not a penance. Pain is not a punishment. Pain is just the price of living in this world. Everyone has to pay it. There are no coupons, no discounts, no fire sales. No one is spared. You pay it and you try to keep going until the next bill is due. The idea that pain is punishment is at the core of humanity's nasty little habit of turning its back on itself and we've been doing that for quite some time now. For all of the time, really. But listen to me. You do not deserve pain. It's not your fault your body hurts all the time or your heart is in pieces all around you or you cry yourself to sleep more often than you don't or you get so afraid you can't breathe sometimes or someone picked your soul clean to make themselves feel bigger or your parents left a hole in you where safety and faith in others should be or that doctors didn't listen or that eggs cost so fucking much.

Unless it is, I mean, you could be a monster, I don't know your life. But monsters sail through minimally-scathed all the time. And it's sure as shit not your fault you weren't born into a perfect situation or you happen to be the kind of human ghouls have decided to hurt for profit this cycle. Most people, most of the time, suffer just because being alive is hard and dumb and gorgeous and bright but mostly dumb. Don't listen to these words that come down to us loaded with all the burdens something as basic as pain has had to bear for all our sentient existence. Pain is just a natural by-product of putting one foot in front of the other on this whirling rock in a radioactive void. There is no magical chain of action you can take to olly-olly-oxen-free your way out. There is no right path through life that can protect anyone. There's just us, here, doing our fucking best.

And I'll tell you something else. Sometimes you can listen to those old, old words. If you're careful. Because suffer also comes from the Latin. Most difficult things do. From sufferire, a variant of sufferre: "to bear, undergo, endure, carry or stand under."

To suffer means to endure. The word itself contains your strength. To say it means you will survive it. At least a little longer. The ship of you, gouged at sea, will take on water, groan, list, drift lost and ghostly, but you'll limp home to port. You'll bail water, you'll call the crew to stations, you'll row for a lifetime, but eventually, you'll catch a strip of green on the horizon, turn past the breakers into the bay, lash yourself to home and tie the knots with everything you have left. Because your pain is not your punishment, it's just your cargo. We all carry it, always, in barrels and crates and vats and tanks and tiny jewel-boxes all in a row. We carry it until it's time to unload it all at last and, almost certainly, take on more.

At least a little longer. At least today. Hopefully tomorrow, but at least today.

Good day to us all, meridian to meridian, and all the ships at sea.