The Broken Heart

Pain isn’t the enemy — misunderstanding it is

Joy and pain are often treated as opposites, as if one cancels the other out. We learn this early. We chase pleasure and avoid pain, believing the absence of one guarantees the presence of the other. That belief simplifies life, but it distorts it.

Joy is an emotional sensation.

Pain is a physical one.

The body does not respect the boundary we try to draw between them. Laughter can hurt. Loss can exhaust the body. Pain does not exist only as an external event; it moves through meaning, memory, and interpretation.

For a long time, I believed pain was caused by something outside of me — circumstances, rejection, events, other people’s decisions. That belief preserved the version of myself I needed to protect. Blame created distance. Distance created survival.

When that belief broke, it did not feel clarifying. It felt exposing.

The pain did not disappear; it relocated. What hurt most was not what happened to me, but what I had been unwilling to see in myself. A self-image built on innocence and reaction could not survive that realization. Once pain no longer had an external target, responsibility became unavoidable.

I had to confront a harder truth: pain was not proof of depth, effort, or sincerity. It was not evidence that I cared more, tried harder, or loved deeper. I had been asking pain to validate who I was — to justify my endurance, my attachment, my worth.

That belief did not survive scrutiny.

I no longer needed pain to validate anything about me. It stopped being proof, justification, or permission. What changed was not that pain disappeared, but that it lost its authority. I could feel it without asking it to define me.

Pain no longer decided the direction of my growth. I no longer allowed it to set the conditions under which I was permitted to feel whole.

Once pain lost that authority, the heart stopped negotiating with it. What remained was quieter and less dramatic — but it could no longer be persuaded to suffer in order to justify its own existence.