Torn Between Pain and Love
Who placed the limits to what we can feel and build?
Pain can be a source of power but so can be love.
Yet, it seems we’ve normalized high degrees of pain absorption and expression so much that seeing love as a source of power seems such a fairy-tale, distant and unbelievable thought.
But love is present and just like water, it can enter through the deepest of wounds, the hardest of hearts and the most fearful of minds.
Love is not the same nor the antithesis of pain.
There are many distortions in cultures and religions over the connection of love and pain.
Some suggesting that:
Love is pain
Pain is the opposite of love
To love is to expose ourselves to pain
And along those lines and several others, we tend to minimize or dismiss the source of power true love is.
Love is powerful because it can co-exist and be felt even in the presence of pain, offering humans a chance to grow and evolve through it.
Pain can be absorbed, accumulated, ignored, numbed, rejected, suppressed or expressed and weaponized.
Pain can be felt and dwelled upon for years, sometimes with no end in sight - individually and collectively.
Pain can be so normalized that its presence is cherished, welcomed and reproduced to build the identities and politics of individuals and nations.
On the other hand, love can be perceived and felt with limits, caution and conditions because its presence can alter human and structural relations that benefit from the pursuit and glorification of pain.
The power of love can evoke uncomfortable thoughts and emotions related to unworthiness, self-denial and collective mistrust.
Questions like:
Who am I to feel deserving of love?
Who am I to love?
Who am I to receive love?
Depending on the societies and cultures we analyze, we can discover the ways love can be perceived as. In some, it can be seen as overwhelming, too much to handle or too good to believe it can stay - or only to be experienced through a relationship with some-one, some-thing or in some-place.
Allowing true love to be a source of power requires something we seem to have forgotten amid the who’s right and who’s wrong battles in the digital and offline worlds.
Love requires trust.
Just as we can trust pain for shaping our view of the world, why we can’t trust love to do the same?
What’s preventing it? Why fear it?
Why trusting the power of love is framed as an act of loss and surrender instead of one of courage and liberation?
We can hold on and carry pain all our lives if we choose to, more so if in the societies we live in this burden is rewarded as badge of honor and compliance.
But, ever wondered how different would our lives be if we allow in, hold on to and carry more…true love for ourselves, each other and the World?