Not intended to make any sense

Physical pain, everyone understands. Correction: physical pain, everyone understands if they can see it. Everyone understands a broken limb, a gushing wound, a torn eyeball, but tell them your pancreas hurts or your ears are ringing, and you’ll probably get the condescending “aw poor thing” bullshit and then they’ll forget all about it.

Even worse is mental agony which not only can’t they see, but they can’t even conceive what it might be like. Tell them that your mind is coming apart at the seams and they’ll just give you a blank stare. You won’t even get the condescending sympathy bullshit. Instead they’re more likely to tell you to stop whining, or if it keeps happening they’ll start ignoring you altogether.

What does it matter if they don’t care? What does it matter if they don’t react? It matters EVERYTHING. When we feel pain we need to understand what that pain is. By watching the reactions of other people who see our injuries, somehow our pain is validated. Like looking in a mirror to gain confidence in how we look, looking at the reactions of others helps us gain confidence in how we feel.

So when others ignore our pain and treat it like we’re imagining it (and yet we can’t be imagining it because it’s tearing us to shreds), we’re suddenly thrown into a hopeless conflict. We feel a horrible agony, and yet nothing is there.

So we scream louder. Maybe we cut ourselves just so we can see the familiar blood that tells us our pain is real. And if that doesn’t work, well there’s always the ultimate embodiment of pain, something that everyone can see and recognize: our death. The more violent and gory it is, the more valid our pain. Blood all over the walls, stringy clumps of flesh and splinters of bone, a twisted ghastly expression with shattered teeth. Is that good enough to prove that I felt pain? Or in the end will they just look at my corpse with the same apathy with which they look at a side of beef at the grocery store. It’s all just meat.