hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”
I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.
That day, I began returning to myself—fearful and trembling, pregnant and six days sober, in a church basement with shitty fluorescent lights and terrible coffee—when a kind woman revealed to me that being fully human is not about feeling happy, it’s about feeling everything. From that day forward, I began to practice feeling it all. I began to insist upon my right and responsibility to feel it all, even when taking the time and energy for feeling made me a little less efficient, a little less convenient, a little less pleasant.
In the past eighteen years, I have learned two things about pain.
First: I can feel everything and survive.
What I thought would kill me, didn’t. Every time I said to myself: I can’t take this anymore—I was wrong. The truth was that I could and did take it all—and I kept surviving. Surviving again and again made me less afraid of myself, of other people, of life. I learned that I’d never be free from pain but I could be free from the fear of pain, and that was enough. I finally stopped avoiding fires long enough to let myself burn, and what I learned was that I am like that burning bush: The fire of pain won’t consume me. I can burn and burn and live. I can live on fire. I am fireproof.
Second: I can use pain to become.
I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution. Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.
Consumer culture promises us that we can buy our way out of pain—that the reason we’re sad and angry is not that being human hurts; it’s because we don’t have those countertops, her thighs, these jeans. This is a clever way to run an economy, but it is no way to run a life. Consuming keeps us distracted, busy, and numb. Numbness keeps us from becoming.
This is why every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain: Don’t avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become. And you are here to become.
Like Buddha, who had to leave his life of comfort to experience all kinds of human suffering before finding enlightenment.
Like Moses, who wandered forty years in the desert before seeing the promised land.
Like Westley from The Princess Bride, who said, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
Like Jesus, who walked straight toward his own crucifixion.
First the pain, then the waiting, then the rising. All of our suffering comes when we try to get to our resurrection without allowing ourselves to be crucified first.
There is no glory except straight through your story.
Pain is not tragic. Pain is magic. Suffering is tragic. Suffering is what happens when we avoid pain and consequently miss our becoming. That is what I can and must avoid: missing my own evolution because I am too afraid to surrender to the process. Having such little faith in myself that I numb or hide or consume my way out of my fiery feelings again and again. So my goal is to stop abandoning myself—and stay. To trust that I’m strong enough to handle the pain that is necessary to the