Suffering is bullsh*t

An underworld journey, the end of a marriage, and finding self trust amidst the senselessness of suffering.

“In moments of extreme pain, physical or psychological, we become stitched to the present moment. It becomes impossible not to be radically present. We can no longer count on a future. And our bright-minded, able-bodied pasts don’t feel like they belong to us anymore. Often the pain is so intense that there is no escape in any direction.”
– Sophie Strand, from The Body is A Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human, forthcoming from Running Press Winter 2025.

“Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”
--Virginia Woolf, from The Waves

“I suddenly realized it was fierce grace.”
-Ram Dass, on the stroke that left him paralyzed

No Pain Like This Body by Lani Maestro, the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022. Source.

The view from the bathroom floor

It’s May 2020, the height of pandemic lockdown. I am facedown on the bathroom floor, fading in and out of consciousness. My partner—spouse—husband—whatever—has shut down, which is a thing he does, a defense against overwhelm. It’s like his nervous system shorts out, like the circuits cannot carry so much empathic current without damaging the neural wiring. I don’t exactly blame him; to be fair, he has work tomorrow, and if he fucks up at work, in addition to losing something he is deeply invested in, the financial hit will punch a cannonball-sized hole in the side of our little economic unit that we absolutely won’t be able to recover from. Moreover, my health emergency has been constant and ongoing for weeks. So yeah, I don’t exactly blame him. But I don’t forgive him, either.

Sophie Strand wrote in a recent essay, in a burst of annoyance at trend-spotting psychedelic tourists, that many of us don’t get to choose our initiations. And that many of us don’t survive them. “Mindfulness isn’t some sterile, packaged experience of transcendence, or Costa Rican ‘shamanic plant ceremony,’” Strand says. “Those with chronic pain or illness, those with psychological anguish and PTSD, experience ego-destroying trips every day when they lie on the floor next to the toilet and try to pass through the needle’s eye of unbearable pain. When they decide to stay alive for just one more minute.”

Whether we live through them or not, I don’t believe we ever actually survive these types of initiatory experience intact. I think it’s fair to say that, one way or another, regardless of whether the fragile, complex, interpenetrating systems of the bodymind collapse so completely that the processes of life actually cease—we never survive an initiation. That’s what makes it an initiation. When the body and mind reach a threshold of crisis, they must transform if the organism is to survive. What emerges past that crisis threshold is fundamentally changed.  

Back on the bathroom floor, I am not thinking about financials, or the fraying fabric of my marriage, or initiations, or anything at all but surviving the microcosm of this moment. My awareness expands and contracts, my thoughts break apart and try to coalesce as I move helplessly in and out of consciousness. My mind spits out glossolalia, gibberish, fragmentary and nonlinear, like frames cut from a film reel flashing randomly on a screen. I think of one of those pinwheel sparklers you see on the forth of July, spitting out bursts of colored sparks. The groundless horror of not being able to make sense. A rush of pins and needles, tingling in my hands. My body spasms, pumping out more bile. My vision blurs. Gray numbness. Timelessness.

In the bedroom across the way, the bedframe creeks as my spouse turns over, expels a snore. No one is coming to save me.

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944, Museo Dolores. Kahlo painted The Broken Column while bedridden, in the excruciating aftermath of a spinal surgery.

Stop the pandemic, I want to get off

Do you remember what things were like in 2020? The the bizarreness, the horror and rank surreality of early pandemic? In the United States, the already strained medical system was actually in crisis. Our local hospital system, overwhelmed with asphyxiating COVID-19 patients, was short on respirators and rationing care. In fact, so many people were seriously ill that field hospitals had been opened at the local convention center. Looking back, it seems unbelievable that I was left to fend for myself when I was that sick. But I had, in fact, been advised by doctors to stay out of the hospital at all costs.

I had been catastrophically sick for several weeks at this point. Because I did not have respiratory symptoms, it did not occur to anyone that I could have COVID.

I had no diagnosis. No institutional support. No idea what was going on. I had no context, no story, no map, to explain what was causing my illness or these episodes of systemic crisis; whether it would kill me, whether it would last forever, or what the long-term consequences might be. That sense of narrative dislocation elevates the experience of suffering by adding a dimension of confusion, terror, and overwhelm.

Diagnosis not only gives you a map that makes sense of what’s you’re going through when you’re sick—it also functions as a kind of on ramp to medical and community care. When you have no diagnosis, often, you also have no support. The medical establishment doesn’t know what to do with you, and the people around you are uncomfortable, afraid, and maybe even skeptical about your condition; without institutional structure and meaningmaking, illness is disorienting, overwhelming.

It took almost three years of intermittent remission and recurrence of my illness for me to get a clear diagnosis. Prior to dealing with Covid’s long shadow, mainstream medicine hadn’t really studied complex, multi-system, post-viral illnesses like mine. When I first met the specialist who diagnosed me, she said, somewhat wryly, to give it a few years, because mainstream medicine was catching up. And she was right. Now, Ehlers-Danlos Sydrome (EDS), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), and mast cell activation are much more well known in the medical community. But back then, as far as my family doctor was concerned, I might as well have had the Andromeda strain, or whatever it was that made aliens bust out of your chest.

Given the pandemic emergency, and the institutional culture and ecosystem they are operating in, I try not to blame the doctors who ignored me or suggested—unbelievably—that my illness was all in my head. But I don’t forgive them, either.

Untitled (Face in Dirt), David Wojnarowicz, 1991. The artist died from complications from AIDS in 1992.

Back on the bathroom floor

Pain tethers you to reality. Pain pulls you back into your embodiment. Holds the tender flesh of your awareness to the hot iron of what is. The ego, on the other hand, is a creature of dissociation. It hovers above the ever-changing realm of concrete, tangible reality. The ego is made of stories and extrapolations. It dreams itself into existence in the tension between implied past and future. When pain drags us into the screaming immediacy of what is actually happening, the drama of orienting ourselves as selves, as egos, as social and temporal beings, becomes unbearable. We thrash backward and forward in time, trying to establish cause and consequence, to think our way to prevention and cure, while tethered to the screaming urgency of pain in the present. What’s happening? What caused this? How can I make it stop? The mind is like a wild dog lunging and bolting and yanking at a chain attached firmly to a fixed point, and the fixed point is the pain, which is what is actually real.

It is almost impossible to stop the thrashing of the ego as it tries to relieve its own suffering. And yet, it’s folly to let this kind of frantic rumination escalate. Worry and panic make pain much, much harder to bear. And, as meditators have known for thousands of years, if you can accept what is happening and still the mind, the ego shrinks, or even pops, temporarily, out of existence, and something remarkable happens.

Facedown on the bathroom floor, I accept the possibility that I might die. That no one is coming to save me. I have reached, perhaps, a threshold of initiation. And something shifts. From panic and helplessness to a quieter state of nonfear, as if I am floating at the center of a clear forest pool. The storm in my body hasn’t abated, but for a moment, the storm in my mind calms.

Acceptance isn’t a thing that you achieve once and get to keep. At least, that is the case for me. I can’t just get to a place of acceptance and stay there. It seems I have to fight my way back through the terror and agony to get to acceptance, every time. Sometimes I have to fight my way to acceptance in every moment, from moment to moment to moment, against pain that drags me back again and again. Usually, I don’t get there at all. But sometimes I do. And when I do, sometimes, something in me shifts. And the person that comes back from that threshold is not quite the same.

Death and the Maiden, Egon Schiele, 1915, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Painted after the artist was drafted into World War I.

Suffering is bullshit

I included the Ram Dass quote at the beginning of this piece precisely because it makes me recoil. “Fierce grace?” Really? Suffering is bullshit. It is senseless. There is no virtue or higher purpose in suffering for its own sake. There is no valor, no dignity, in suffering. The glorification of suffering is a tool of oppressors who bully us into enduring exploitation by telling us it is virtuous to endure. And it’s easy, in moments when suffering is absent, to look back at a difficult time and acknowledge the ways we pushed back against adversity, building wisdom and skill. Or to admire great artworks that come out of profound suffering. But there is also a sentimental human tendency to romanticize suffering that I want to try very hard to resist.

At the same time, the skills I have had to develop, and the ways I have had to transform, in order to survive the past four years have made me a wiser, kinder person. I have greater capacity and compassion. I am less dissociated, I seem to feel everything more deeply and vividly. I feel more connected to what is happening to the earth in this devastating, apocalyptic epoch, and to other people and animals, in their suffering and joy. I am less lost in my personal, egoic dreams and fears, desires and aversions, and more connected to what’s real. My behavior is more in alignment with my own deepest values.

And I know, on a bone-deep level, that I can be relied upon not to abandon myself. I did not have that level of self-trust before. I know that I will keep advocating, investigating, and pushing to protect myself and those I love for as long as needed. I know because I did it. And to do it, I had to change. And I changed because I was suffering.

In this dharma talk, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh seems to say first, that suffering can be a valuable teacher, and second, that the problem with suffering is not actually suffering itself, but rather, our limited capacity to hold it.

When you suffer, you learn compas­sion and understanding. But your suffering can also overwhelm you…To suffer some is important, but the dosage should be correct for us. We need to learn the art of taking good care of our suffering so we can learn the art of transforming it.

Regulated doses of pharmaceutical-grade suffering sound fine, but in this world, we can’t exactly titrate our suffering as we please. So I try to imagine a state of enlightenment in which it is possible to maintain that feeling of acceptance that opens the threshold of initiation in the oceanic depths of suffering. I cannot imagine being so evolved.

Meanwhile, we all get to make, out of the raw material of our experience, the meaning that is meaningful for us. We get to choose how to make sense of our lives. Ram Dass gets to decide that his stroke is fierce grace. I get to decide my suffering is bullshit.

Except I can’t draw any tidy conclusions about these initiatory experiences, these death processes, these underworld journeys—that ultimately almost all of us will go through, as part of the project of being mortal. Whether we survive them or not. So I will stay here in the murky ambivalence of it.

Thanks, dear reader, for being here with me.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about anything this brought up for you.