Utilize Your Suffering

This world is full of suffering - that's a fact.

There is no such thing as a person who has not experienced suffering - no matter how great their Instagram looks, no matter how happy they seem at every fleeting moment you encounter them.

I can speak from experience. Other people thought I was having the time of my life, travelling all over the world after graduating from a top university. In reality, I was fleeing a broken home and seeing my life fall apart from a seemingly endless barrage of unfortunate events. In the course of a few months, I lost my family, my friends, my finances, my reputation, my community, my health, and my sense of self. 

Exhibit 1: The Instagram posts that made people feel like they were experts on my life.

So I observed a lot of things about suffering this past year, especially the way people prefer to handle it. The answer is that they usually don't.

Our problem with meaningless consumption - whether it be through procrastination on Netflix or Twitter, or shopping sprees on Amazon - often stems from our primary coping method for terrible times: avoidance.

But what if I said that we were meant to utilize our suffering, rather than run away from it?

Utilize our suffering, rather than run away from it

For so much of our lives, suffering has been framed as a fruitless curse, a disease that people need to recover from. The mere thought of suffering – an affliction we can neither control nor change – can immediately put us into a cold sweat. It could even be argued that the aspirations of our milieu are predominantly geared to protect ourselves from suffering. Money, status, and relationships are all perceived as powerful cushions against potential misfortune, even before their usefulness in producing happiness. 

But if we can radically shift our view of suffering to see it as a dynamic, challenging, and ultimately productive experience, we can evolve from understanding life as a constant binary of happy vs. sad to live fuller and more inspiring lives. For example,

1.    Suffering can radically expand our depth for empathy.

Empathy is an essential ingredient for good leadership, meaningful networking, and maintaining relationships. Some people are born with heaps of it, and many people…just aren’t. The good news is that empathy can be developed over the life course. 

When privilege afforded me good health, a great career trajectory, and kindness from other people, I spoke in the language of effort, not luck. Good things happened to diligent people. Misfortune came upon the lazy. This kind of crazy pride obviously resulted in a lot of heartless and alienating behaviour. 

What I learned through my afflictions was that suffering happens to everyone. And it’s impossible to ‘rank’ people’s suffering on an objective scale. No one can answer for their tribulations, nor can they solve it with grit and hard work.

Suffering happens to everyone.

When I talked about my pain, I noticed that it opened a gateway for people to give all sorts of advice, as if I could ‘fix’ my suffering away. Or – better yet – they compared my circumstances to refugees in Syria. “See?” they said. “It’s not so bad!”

The lack of empathy I encountered reminded me of how I had failed to support others in the past. Ultimately, my own suffering placed me smack dab in others’ shoes and helped me understand the perspectives of people I had never been able to understand before. It also made me realize how bad we are as a society to talk coherently about suffering. I can’t say enough how much these reflections improved my communication methods as a friend, mentor, co-worker, and overall human being.

2.    Suffering can make you an irreplaceable advocate of change.

Emma Gonzales is a teenager who, at a young age, witnessed and endured suffering that could have been prevented. Her response to suffering was the passion to enact change – and it gave her a personal testimony that was so powerful, she hardly needed a few sentences to invoke solidarity across the world.

The thing is, the gun control issue has been in heated debate for many years. Every time innocent young lives were taken by America’s singularly unregulated gun policy, people rose up in anger and grief to advocate for change. But we have never seen so much attention and progress as now, when teens themselves are rising up to tell their stories and demand Never Again.

Why? People are never inspired by the facts – they’re inspired by stories.  

Suffering is a painful experience that we would avoid if we had the choice. But it also gives us a personal perspective to awful realities happening to many people all over the world. In some cases, one personal perspective becomes a powerful call to action that inspires a movement to change the world. 

3.    Suffering can teach patience.

How many people feel entitled to good things as a mere condition of existence?

Probably most of us, though we wouldn’t admit it. We freak out when bad things happen because deep in our hearts, we believe that we deserve good fortune.

According to the Expectation-Reality Gap theory, much of our unhappiness in the developed world comes from our incessant desire to have it better than we should reasonably hope for. If our expectations are that life should give us the good and spare us from the bad, facing reality will certainly be an exercise in anxiety.

Particularly in a techno-economic age that has made instant results the norm, many of us have forgotten the virtue of patience. We’re also emotionally drained from the demands of this era. Retail, personality marketing, social media – the give-and-take never stops.

In the midst of it all, suffering demands a pause to re-examine our assumptions and expectations of our world and ourselves. When we don’t, it turns into trauma: according to Judy Fong Bates, “pain that is set aside and not allowed to heal.”

From suffering, I learned that I could never predict the course of my life. That I was never entitled to good luck, and that we all struggle with darkness. The best thing we can do is to persevere, and to help each other along the road.

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I can tell you personally that when my suffering became too much, living no longer became an option. Every time I stood before a crosswalk during a red light, I dared myself to walk just two paces forward. Just two paces.

It wasn’t that I was obsessed with my emotions or making a statement. The pain of the present was too overwhelming for me to face anything else – regardless of the good times of the past, or the promise of the future. I needed this suffering to end NOW. But it didn’t.

When I stood before the door of despair, I realized that I actually wanted to live. I just didn’t have the strength to make it through on my own. So I asked for help.

My friends gave me recommendations and the courage to seek professional support. My family agreed to pay for treatment. I’ve been remarkably fortunate to find an incredible counsellor. And since then, I’ve been rebuilding my life.

I say ‘rebuild’ because in the eyes of others, I’m regaining the excellent showpieces that made my life what it was – a career, good health, fun relationships. But actually, I feel like I’m gaining in ways that I never did before. Now, I wouldn’t change my experience for anything.

Suffering was a radical turning point that forced me to acknowledge my fears, identify some deeply inconvenient truths, and dismantle the mask I’d perfected to hide them. This process was really ugly and frankly, nearly fatal. But now I know that I’m living for myself, not as a knee-jerk reaction to my anxieties. I take my accolades with a grain of salt, because no person can foresee even 5 seconds into the future. And I know that no moment lasts forever – for better or for worse.

No moment lasts forever – for better or for worse.

You have the power.

I’ve seen a good number of people encounter suffering and allow it to seep deep into their character. They use their suffering for one purpose: to excuse themselves for ruining their lives and others. “I can’t help it,” they say. “This is how the world treated me, and this is how I’m going to treat you.”

Remember that being passive to suffering is a choice. Remember that your choices have power. When you look your suffering in the eye, when you make the decision to wrestle and tame it, I have no doubt that you will emerge with strengths that are quintessentially your own.