The 4 Types of Suffering I'm Grateful for Having
Amanda Stern
November 30, 2022
The 4 Types of Suffering I'm Grateful for Having
Amanda Stern
I don’t know why, but the word “gratitude” has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Perhaps it’s because there have been too many times when I’ve been forced to enumerate my gratitude publicly, before I was ready, or even knew it was required.
Maybe that’s not a big deal for some, but if you have an anxiety disorder, it can be a huge deal.
When I am put on the spot like that, I simply cannot think. Of anything.
CUT TO:
INT. HIGH SCHOOL. DAY
The late 1980s in a windowless cafeteria.
CLOSE ON:
A blank SAT test stares up at a panic-stricken high-school senior FOR HOURS, waiting for her to darken just one circle.
Getty Images | filo
So, it’s not that I am ungrateful; I just prefer to acknowledge my gratitude in the moments the feeling arises, and not artificially yank it up before the root is ready.
Make sense?
Anyway, I’ve been sick for 21 days, and I lack the energy to research the piece I’d anticipated publishing today (it’s coming next week). So I thought I’d focus on what I have genuinely felt to be an abundance of gratitude for these past few weeks.
Instead of calling out the usual suspects—my friends, family, siblings, dog, nieces, nephews, candy, Honees cough drops, and antibiotics, etc., I’m expressing my gratitude today to the things that I once wanted to have surgically removed from my life, and now, decades later, finally appreciate.
ANXIETY + PANIC
Original art for How to Live by Edwina White
Yes, I am grateful to my anxiety and panic.
While I would not wish to relive the first 30 years of my life, when I was consumed, almost daily, by panic attacks and/or extreme anxiety, my disorder—more than anything else in my life—gave me the reason to relentlessly pursue my own mental health.
I knew there was an easier way to live—I saw it all around me. The depth of my suffering fueled the energy and drive I needed to seek out the nourishing side of life.
Without my early suffering, I honestly don’t think I would be as comfortable with discomfort as I am now (yes, it still sucks, but I do not try to literally hide from it in the back of my closet, anymore).
I accept it.
I walk into it.
Because I understand now that the sooner I face what scares me, the sooner the fear will shrink.
It’s not just that I have grown stronger since deciding, at age 25, to face every single one of my fears; it’s that the world itself has grown larger each time I do. The world and all of its options expand and multiply once you stop avoiding the things you think you cannot do.
Anxiety is a fear of the future, of not knowing what will happen, and it places you inside that terrible anticipation one feels right before you do something you're scared to do. The difference is the fear an anxious person feels is out of proportion to the event in question.
The fear, to an anxious person, feels like actual danger.
Anxiety is an often learned inability to sit with uncertainty, to remain inside the static of the unresolved.
These wise words from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, have always helped me when I feel stuck, not inside my discomfort, but when I can see the discomfort coming toward me, a hundred miles away:
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could no the given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
SOLITUDE
Original art for How to Live by Edwina White
Until I was in my mid-30s, I thought loving someone meant merging with them, becoming fused and enmeshed.
The version of love I’d always known was one of co-dependence. As I understood it, if your loved one didn’t need you, if you didn’t need them, then you didn’t really love one another.
Being independent, being inter–dependent, was a red flag–a danger sign.
Yet, I was terrified of true intimacy and vulnerability. The idea of revealing my true self to someone else–instead of the false self that was so familiar–filled my body with ice-cold terror.
What if they didn’t like me?
What if I didn’t like them?
It wasn't the questions themselves that upset me; it was not having the answers that made me feel like going toward love meant walking blindfolded at the edge of El Capitan.
I didn’t understand then that my fear of intimacy meant that instead of feeling it, I was performing it.
I fostered the space between me and my loved one that was need-based. I spent all my energy there, making sure they knew they could count on me at all times, at any hour of the day or night, no matter what, without realizing that I wasn’t focused at all on how I even felt about the other person.
I wasn’t focused on the part of me that wanted and needed and desired things, the things that meant “me.” I was focused only on the parts of a relationship that I understood signaled love.
"Loving does not mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished and still incoherent–?) ... But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ... "
It took a long time for me to learn and understand that this isn’t love, and in fact, it’s not even loving.
Doting on someone, being there for someone all the time, so that they don’t ever have to rely on themselves, or be alone, or face the truth of their own fears, is the least loving thing a person can do.
In fact, sometimes, what feels like the meanest thing to do—to walk away from someone who relies on you repeatedly to fix their mess, never trying to seek answers or grow on their own—is the most loving thing you can do.
Letting go of someone so that they might finally face their hardships might just change their lives.
It took me a long time to truly cherish my time alone. I’d gotten so used to being on 24-hour-call for others that when I was finally alone, I wasn’t quite sure how to entertain myself.
But, as I learned quickly, there is so much to do.
I love making things: I paint and draw. I sew. I taught myself to play guitar. I read, I write, I take on home-improvement projects. I make clothes. I make presents for people. I have taught myself to cook, edit videos, fix my toilet, and be my own on-call tech support.
Once I understood the beauty of self-reliance, I never, ever wanted to get stuck in a situation where I felt obligated to be available to someone else who could not help themselves.
Of course, I’ve slipped here and there, but I am grateful that I now understand the power of interdependence, and can revel in my self-reliance. Even if it has meant having to lose some friends and boyfriends in the process.
"We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better is it to recognize that we are all alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far."
DISCOMFORT
Original art for How to Live by Edwina White
Ah, discomfort, you burdensome beast.
Here’s the best part about discomfort: Once you’ve sat through the worst of it, you grow a type of emotional callus and awaken to the realization that discomfort does not kill you.
Living through pain, through uncertainty, is what being alive means. The more we do it, the better we get at it, the less we fear it, and the stronger we become.
Does it ever feel good?
No.
But like contractions before the baby comes, the length of time between fear and facing your fear grows shorter, because allowing yourself to feel discomfort means spending less time avoiding it, and it’s the avoidance that adds flame to a person’s fire of feeling fear.
"Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET
The copy I've had since 1997
I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when I was 27, and it changed my life forever.
This little book opened my eyes to the idea that solitude wasn’t scary; it was necessary. Learning how to be a writer meant learning how to be alone. And reading this book taught me what to expect during solitude, and to be excited by the prospect.
It offered me reasons to get comfortable living with uncertainty. Plus, Rilke calls uncertainty "Living the questions" which feels practically noble.
This book has been within hand's reach for decades. The binding is disintegrating, and the pages are loose but still bound. It’s like my heart—torn, yet held together.
Every page is a passage filled with meaning that shifts the way you think about something; that opens your heart and mind to a better, more enhanced way to exist, even if it means living alone.
The quotes throughout this piece are taken from this gem of a book (in my extremely humble opinion, the Stephen Mitchell translation is the best one—get that one!), which details the letters Rilke wrote to a 19-year-old student named Franz Xaver Kappus.
Here’s the backstory: In the fall of 1902, Kappus sat under a tree on the Viennese campus of his military school reading one of Rilke’s books of poetry. A professor walked by and remarked that Rilke had been his student ten years earlier at the same school.
Taken by this connection, young Kappus sent Rilke some of his poems, seeking his feedback.
The correspondence between them lasted six years, and this book comprises the ten letters that Rilke wrote to the young poet, offering what is arguably some of the best and wisest advice ever written.
And you?
Are you grateful for your hardship? What in particular do you feel was worthy of your suffering?
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Until next week I remain…
Amanda
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