FEAR.

“Why God, why God do I gotta bleed? Every stone thrown at you is restin’ at my feet.”

In amidst of an extremely stressful semester, with colossal responsibilities and even larger expectations, I often stare out into the corner of my room and wonder “How much suffering is too much?” This act of balancing academic demands with personal relationships and also with club activities, really show me what kind of life I’m living right now and, more often than not, it’s not the kind of life I would like to live.

A lot of philosophers and thinkers throughout human history often mention that, suffering is necessary. We ought to bleed before we can feel. But is this really true? One could argue that suffering enables us to be more resilient in enduring life’s hardships, that pain makes us stronger. But when you really start asking the intrinsic purpose of suffering itself, this argument sort of breaks down. What is the purpose of the voices inside my head that’s been telling me to end it all for the past month? Is this what all of us can do in the face of great pain and misery? To just endure it for as long as you can, in hopes that “things will get better” or that “this too shall pass”

The awful and delusional over-optimistic talk sickens me the most. Not only are they the product of a justification and romanticization of suffering itself, it plagues my mind with false expectations and promises that all of this pain and torture will fade away in the future. Like a parasite harboring one’s mind, over-optimism refuses to confront the torturing pain of the present by denying it and putting it on hold for the future to deal with. Things may never get better and this may never pass. And I’m okay with that.

What’s fatal to me about suffering is that I really could not give a single ounce of meaningless crap about anyone in this blue ball of hell. Because why would I? I don’t feel any urgency or need to be caring of anyone’s well-being when I’m not even given the chance to take care of mine. I wish I felt sorry for this, I wish there’s some part of me that feels a sense of guilt for behaving this sort of way. But there just isn’t. Incredibly selfish, I know, but can you really blame me at this point?

And I think that’s why hardships are detrimental to all of us. When you’re not able to meaningfully change someone’s misfortune, it subconsciously becomes a competition of who can suffer more? Or who is in the greater pain? This mentality stems from the hopelessness that one feels when suffering is finally handed to them in a raw state. When you finally are able to see what I have been seeing. You project your own pain, so you can feel better about not being able to do anything with mine. That is what will kill us all.

At the heart of the issue I often ask myself, “Who is to blame for all of this?” Is it God? If so, why would He do this to us? The son of God died for our sins. He endured a lifetime of torture and torment for our transgressions. But did he really wanted this? Did he wanted to suffer for all of us? My own religion states that humans are the most perfect creation that God could conjure. And this is how He decides to treat us? One hell of a price for perfection.

Maybe suffering lies at the heart of existence for every living creature. That all that is living today, had to suffer the most back then. Which makes the act of suffering itself embedded to every single strand of our DNA. This means that the meaning of life itself, at least evolutionarily, lies in great pain and misery. And I don’t know how to feel about that. To think that my own presence in the world is conjured up by a biological need for pain is revolting.

Regardless, seeking something to blame for my own pain, isn’t going to make it go away but I would be lying if I said the prospect of something to blame wouldn’t make me feel a bit better. To close this troubling and depressing rambling, I would like to end on something that has been planting itself slowly in the floors and ceilings of this ruined home, I call my mind.

Life isn’t about choices, it’s about consequence. You reap what you sow.