What To Do With Pain

My son,

I need to tell you something I wish someone had told me earlier:

You don't have to become impossible to hurt in order to be safe.

That is one of the lies pain will offer you.

It'll tell you the answer is to get harder.

Quieter.

Busier.

More useful.

More impressive.

Less reachable.

It'll tell you that if nobody can see where it landed, maybe it didn't land that deeply.

That isn't healing.

That's hiding with better posture.

I know because I've done it.

At fifteen, I carried anger that had nowhere safe to go.

Not the kind people always notice.

Mine was quieter.

It turned into pride.

Distance.

A face that said I was fine before anyone had a chance to ask.

I learned how to look unbothered.

That was one of the first lies I learned when I didn't have language for grief.

If I could sit beside that boy now, I wouldn't tell him to toughen up.

I'd tell him, You are hurt.

And I would stay long enough for him to believe me.

Later, I carried the same habit in older clothes.

I've been hurt and gone straight into motion.

Work gave me something to control.

Anger gave me something that felt stronger than grief.

Distance let me pretend I didn't need anything.

From the outside, that can look like a man handling his life.

He keeps moving.

He gets things done.

He doesn't make a scene.

He doesn't make people uncomfortable with his need.

But pain doesn't disappear because it becomes efficient.

It just learns to travel under your habits.

It shows up in your tone.

In your impatience.

In the way you hear correction as attack.

In the way a simple question can make your whole body defend something that happened years before.

That is what pain does when a man refuses to let anyone see it.

It recruits the present to protect the past.

I don't want that for you.

Pain will come for you.

I hate writing that, but pretending otherwise would be a useless kind of fatherhood.

Someone will disappoint you.

Someone may leave.

Someone will misunderstand you.

You will fail yourself.

You will hurt someone you love.

You will lose things you thought were secure.

And when that happens, the old invitations will come.

Close up.

Get hard.

Find someone to blame.

Become useful so nobody asks what hurts.

Those instincts might get you through a day.

Sometimes standing is all you can do.

But don't build a life there.

Listen to me:

surviving pain is not the same as healing from it.

Survival asks, how do I get through this without falling apart?

Healing asks, what am I carrying now that doesn't belong in the next room?

That second question will make you feel small at first.

It'll ask you to stop performing competence long enough to tell the truth.

The truth may be simple.

I'm hurt.

I'm scared.

I miss them.

I feel ashamed.

I don't know what to do next.

Those sentences don't make you weak.

They keep the wound from becoming your personality.

One mistake I made was treating pain like proof that I needed to become unreachable.

I thought if I built enough, achieved enough, controlled enough, proved enough, nobody would be able to reach the soft part again.

But the soft part isn't the problem.

The soft part is where love enters.

If you armor it forever, you don't just keep pain out.

You keep out joy.

Repair.

Tenderness.

The people who are trying to reach you without damaging you.

So when pain comes, tell the truth before it turns into a weapon.

Say what happened.

Say what you felt.

Say what you're tempted to do because of it.

Pain becomes dangerous when it starts writing plans in secret.

And don't make the people closest to you pay for pain they didn't create.

You may want to aim your hurt at whoever is nearby because nearby people are easier to reach than old wounds.

Try not to.

And when you do, repair quickly.

Let someone witness you before you're polished.

Not everyone deserves that access.

Choose carefully.

But choose someone.

A friend.

A mentor.

A counselor.

Someone who can sit with the truth without rushing to make you impressive again.

And give your body somewhere honest to put the grief.

Walk.

Pray.

Cry.

Write.

Sit in the car and say the thing out loud with no audience.

Let the pain move without making someone else decode it from your silence.

There will be days when you feel broken.

You are not broken because you hurt.

You're human because you hurt.

A man doesn't become whole by never bleeding.

He becomes whole by learning what to do when he does.

I can't keep every wound from reaching you.

I wish I could.

But I can give you language for the wound, so you don't have to turn it into silence, cruelty, or a life spent proving you were never hurt at all.

If pain breaks you open, don't rush to close.

Stay open long enough to tell the truth.

Then heal in a way that doesn't make someone else inherit the damage.

~ Dad