pain demands to be felt

I have been watching Bridget Jones for lunch for the past few weeks and it made me self-reflect.

That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.

This was from the famous book, The Fault in Our Stars, written by John Green a bajillion years ago (2012). I was one of those people who watched the movie first before reading the book; books weren't very accessible to me then, but movies were easier to be pirated. Back then, when the character, Augustus, said it, I only interpreted it as is, that pain is something that is inevitable, and you just have to accept it. I was 13 then.

Now, as someone in her twenties and having been through a lot (and will be going through much more!), the meaning has deepened.

Yes, pain is something that is inevitable to everyone—as long as you’re living and breathing, it will find you in one form or another. But what differs is how we meet it. Over time, I’ve noticed that people tend to fall into a few patterns.

First, the avoiders—the kind that will do everything to avoid feeling that pain, to forget it as if it never happened. They might drown themselves in work, alcohol, or bodies, just to distract themselves from feeling that pain at all. But don't all kind of pain teaches us something? Such as, grief is just love that is worth preserving. Or a breakup makes you reflect on yourself, teaching you new things about yourself. The thing about pain is that it teaches, and if you refuse to sit with it, you miss the lesson entirely. For many avoiders, healing never truly happens; the hurt just lingers in the background, resurfacing in different forms because it was never allowed to be felt in the first place.

Second, the sprinters—the kind that will do everything to get over it as soon as possible, to forget it quicker. Which should be better than avoiding it, right? I've been there, and I've done that. Impulsively deleting pictures and text messages, cutting all loose ends as soon as possible, tearing out every emotional root before the soil even settles. And the regret hits later, when you realise you didn’t just lose the person or the memory—you lost the time you needed to grieve. Suddenly, you’re grieving the impulsive decisions and the original heartbreak.

Third, the drowners—the kind that drown in it, not being able to forget, time stops for them as they keep dwelling in that pain. When you're having a hard time, it's natural to feel like you're having the hardest time in the world. Life becomes muted, like the world turned grayscale and forgot the saturation slider. I lived in that place for a year after losing my grandfather. I don’t wish that version of grief on anyone. If you're here now, I hope your heart finds a way to breathe again.

And the fourth, the accepters—the kind that feel it, cry, drown for a bit, but they don’t force themselves out before they’re ready. They let the pain marinate, teach, reshape, and eventually release them. This, I think, is the healthiest way—not because it’s easy, but because it’s honest. Healing isn’t a race; it’s a becoming. To know that you will feel pain, needs to go through it and believe that you'll heal is the most human thing to learn. 

Perhaps recent events in my life have made me more introspective (or maybe it's just November), but I don't actually believe that healing is a simple matter of right or wrong. There is no fixed formula. There are only ways that serve you better in the long term. I have been all four versions of myself at different points—and each one taught me something about what it means to be human, fragile, and resilient, whether I'm healing chaotically or more gracefully. 

Pain demands to be felt. But in feeling it, we will learn and grow to become someone better. So when we feel it, embrace it all the way and believe that we will come out of it with a different kind of spark. Cue music: It Isn't Perfect but it Might Be by Olivia Dean.