Ouch!

Can we rank pain?

If you were to ask me to think back to all the times I’ve experienced ‘pain’, my mind immediately races to hazily seeing my puffy, pink scleras through thick tears and sticky eyelashes on my phone camera, begging myself to fall asleep in the pitch-blackness of my Chicago hotel room so my mind will finally turn off, opening then closing then reopening the familiar greens blues and greys of old texts in the dead of night, the panic that ensues from letting your emotions overcome you. There’s an oddly specific fear that envelops you when you don’t know how to break your unhealthy-mindset-of-the-month.

Knowing all of those lovely experiences personally, however, has made me a bit of a snob. Whenever I hear the daily drama—which essentially always involves some petty fight or someone getting backhanded/judo kicked in the name of life—there’s an immediate trashy ranking I give the people involved: Innocent, Relatable, or Poor Thing, ‘Innocent’ meaning you are idiotic for thinking you have the right to be upset, ‘Relatable’ being pretty self explanatory, and ‘Poor Thing’ meaning you really got dealt the short straw in life when you certainly do not deserve it.

Admit it— I can’t be the only one who does this, with our billions of odd sentimental neural connections making it virtually impossible to hear about a situation without connecting it to your own. It’s not exactly the most fun thing to admit, but let’s not lie...we all have at least a tad bit of trivial judgement floating around in us. I was very aware of my horrendous judging habits at around the end of 2018, my goal being to ‘be nice’ for my resolution, but I soon forgot about this ‘goal’ until today.

Now, answering my own question, it is assuredly impossible for us to realistically rank our pain as higher or more severe than another’s (against my instinctively bratty reaction to declare otherwise). David Foster Wallace, although speaking about lobster-murder, truthfully stated that “since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own.” There is no way for us to know how severe a person’s pain may be from what would seem to be a minute situation for us personally. There is no way to know whose tears are more legitimate. There is no way to know if someone’s lack of emotion implies the insides of their brain are actually more nauseating than ours. We can’t even take each other’s own word for it, because we will never be able to compare the emphasis we place behind each odious utterance that describes the inner-grievances of our hearts.

We just don’t know.