on how pain connects us..🕯️

“Your suffering does not isolate you. Your suffering is your bridge” -James Baldwin

I was thinking about this quote by James Baldwin, and it struck me how much people can feel lonesome while struggling with their own lives. We go on suffering and thinking no one could have ever felt these weights before. We think that this feeling is alien and that we shouldn’t feel this way, that our experiences are strange. It can get really lonely, especially when the feeling is new yet persistent in our minds. You look at others thinking that they have it together, but they are just as tired as you are. But no one is saying how they feel. We go on to believe that no one can relate to how we are feeling and that no one has suffered the way we’ve suffered.

Everyone is hesitant to say how they’re really feeling. Everyone is afraid to share a bad experience, thinking they are going to be outcasted. Vulnerability is now being perceived as weakness. When you are going through something new and something that the people around you have not experienced, this feeling can come with a sort of unexplainable shame. We begin to think that there is something wrong with us that we have these struggles. But then I watched that Baldwin interview, in which he said that our sufferings do not isolate us, that we can hear or read something and find people experiencing our pain and grief in similar ways. The truth is that in our sufferings, we can find connection to others. Our struggles should not be something to keep to ourselves, it should be shared and taught as lessons.

your suffering is your bridge because it allows you to connect and relate to others. When you stop being in your head too much and you look around, you find other people experiencing life in different ways. Our pain is not something to be hid, it should be shared so we could try to shed a little light on each other’s lives.

Films, books, and music are all about sharing experiences with each other, whether of happiness or of sadness. These forms of art make us feel seen and heard and we realize that we are not lonesome in our struggles. We realize that we are not alone. I believe that when you share your struggles with someone and how you overcame those struggles, you make them feel a little bit less lonely and you give them hope.

When you see your pain painted, or hear it in a song, or observe it in a film, or even see it in someone’s eyes, your soul begins to rest, no longer fidgeting to explain the sadness or make sense of the emptiness. As long as you begin to feel seen, healing can really begin. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to overshare or tell your struggles to people you don’t feel comfortable with. It just means when you see your struggles in someone else, you just let them know they will be okay.

Struggles and painful moments are bound to happen and it is a fact that no one is ever immune. How we deal with them is our own business but we have to understand that everyone is carrying their own weight and everyone is trying to find their own strength, but from time to time, maybe we can rely on each to other to carry our weights.

Written with love, angie 🕯️