Where Do You Put The Pain?

It’s easy to start things.

The notebook is pristine, sitting on the coffee table. The running shoes, box fresh, patiently waiting by the door. The calendar is a blank slate and the new relationship feels like the peanut butter jar you swear you’ll put down after the next spoonful. Beginnings are seductive because they offer transformation without asking you to pay for it. Everything exists in possibility with no demand yet. All promise and no price tag.

But anything worth doing eventually comes with a cost.

And it’s never the Hollywood kind either. Not the montage where you grit your teeth, hear the strings swell, and triumphantly become your best self in 90 seconds. It’s the slow and ordinary cost that arrives when you are too far in to pretend it was never your idea, but nowhere near the end.

That is precisely the moment the pain arrives.

And then there’s the real question, the one that decides whether something becomes a chapter of your life or another abandoned draft.

Where do you put the pain?

We like to imagine pain as an intruder, showing up to ruin an otherwise good plan. But most of the time pain is not an accident. It’s part of the deal. The T&Cs you agreed to without reading because the headline sounded so goddamn good.

Go for a long run and you will eventually reach that moment where your breathing gets messy, your legs feel like they have been filled with wet sand, and the call of the couch suddenly feels like ascending to Valhalla. Not because you are weak, but because repetition is a particular kind of psychological friction. Sometimes pain is the boredom of repetition.

Get a tattoo and you knowingly walk into a room where pain is part of what you sign up for. It’s not only the sting, it’s how much time of the pain you can handle. It’s the strange mental gymnastics of how many more minutes of this you can tolerate, held against the idea that this image will still be on your body when you are old enough to hate your music taste from this year but still have “no regerts.” Sometimes it’s how much pain can be tolerated now, compared to the payoff later.

Stay in a relationship long enough and you will meet the pain of friction. Not because the relationship is wrong, but because two histories trying to build a shared life will eventually collide. Realising that your partner is not a custom-built emotional service and that neither are you. It’s messy and anything but a simple rom-com standing in the rain declaring our love for each other.[5]

The thing is, we do not just choose things in our lives, we choose a pattern of pain that comes attached to them.

The runner chooses monotony and exhaustion. The tattooed person chooses temporary suffering for permanent meaning. The committed partner chooses the inevitable discomfort of being close to another person without being able to control them. Even the artist chooses a very specific kind of pain: the pain of seeing the gap between what you can imagine and what you can currently make.

The problem is not that pain shows up. The problem is what we do with it once it does.

Because pain you ignore does not disappear. It is very sneaky. Sigmund Freud thought of this as a kind of repetition compulsion: the same mistakes, the same arguments, the same self-sabotage, even when they clearly make us miserable. The pain has to live somewhere, so it moves into our habits, our slipped-out words, or our behavioural patterns instead.

It reappears in new forms like procrastination, doomscrolling and numbing. Into picking fights about glasses left beside a sink because you cannot name the actual thing that is frustrating you. Into training harder than you should, not because you are disciplined, but because you are trying to outrun a feeling until your body forces a stop. Or maybe into a resentment that quietly piles up because of the un-lived life you didn’t have the courage to live.

The pain is like tinnitus, ringing in your ears that you only notice when you stop for a second.

Acknowledged pain is different. Not because it instantly becomes pleasant, but because it becomes located. Suddenly it’s something tangible instead of a ghost.

There is a difference between dragging yourself through the last few kilometres resenting the run and pushing through thinking: yes, I want to stop, and I’m choosing to continue anyway. There is a difference between sitting through an argument smiling politely, thinking of how to make the conversation disappear, and instead thinking of how to hold space for the other person to express their emotions and for you to fully engage with why these things continually come up.

Bringing attention to the pain does not eliminate it, but it does change the texture of it. Simone Weil thought real attention to suffering was almost miraculous because it lets pain exist without turning it into either a weapon or a selfie caption. It becomes something you can relate to, instead of something that just happens to you.

The key question isn’t whether the pain is justified. It’s whether you actually want the life on the other side of it.

There’s an obvious caveat here, which matters. Pain is not evenly distributed. Some people are born carrying far more of it than others, through no fault of their own. Telling everyone to treat pain as a character-building opportunity to build an empire from is close to what some critics call a “luxury belief” when you are saying it from a life that has given you options.

Some suffering is just suffering, it’s not all growth. Sometimes pain is a sign you are forcing yourself into a shape that does not fit. Sometimes it is not formation, it is self-abandonment dressed up as discipline. There is a kind of person who can turn any misery into a virtue. That person is not automatically wise. They are sometimes just loyal to the wrong story.

But maybe we could choose to stop ignoring the pain and believing that things should always be smooth sailing. Maybe we could stop pretending that our project, relationship, fitness or health journey, or even the dinner party we’ve planned for our friends which is now a small pile of ashes in the oven looking more like the remnants of a failed ritualistic sacrifice, should be free of pain and suffering. Instead, from the start we could acknowledge that pain is going to show up eventually, and the only question then is: when the pain comes, where will you put it?