Suffering Doesn’t Make You Special
Written by Kelly Murphy
When I was a little girl, I used to regularly hold my hand to my heart and weep into pillowcases. I thought that was what it meant to be in love, and I wanted to be in love, so I thought about Beauty and the Beast and my grandmother’s favorite soap operas and swooned and sobbed to approximate what I thought were the dizzying heights of romantic passion. I thought you could not know the joy of love without the pain of longing. I was an obedient child and I learned my cultural lessons early and well: if you are a woman, you must suffer. And then I made life worse for myself a few years later when I decided I wanted to be an artist.
I was not just a teenager in suburbia. I was one of the OG ‘90s case studies of the “I’m not like the other girls” girl. I was determined to be an artist, a writer, someone whose brains and talent were so unstoppable that my lack of physical pulchritude wasn’t an impediment: it was merely an incidental finding. Tied up in the belief that I was meant for a life devoted to Art (capital A like you do for God) was an equally fervent belief that a life devoted to art was a life that would be enveloped by suffering. You had to suffer to make art, you had to suffer to understand art, and art was not art if it wasn’t painful for the creator and their audience.
If you think I let go of those beliefs in my 20s, you clearly think more highly of younger me than you should. And if you think I let go of those notions before the age of 30, bless you for your out-sized compassion and your mistaken belief that I learned my lesson about suffering for art before I received my first gray hair. We all get there eventually, it just takes a lot of time and therapy and diagnoses and unnecessary self-inflicted bullshit for some of us before we reach the promised land of a semblance of daily balance.
I do not fancy myself a wise elder, but if I can offer any advice, it would be this: do not believe for one instant that the key to depth and greatness as a writer is any way tied to suffering, pain, or emotional degradation. You are not a superb writer if you are in constant turmoil. In fact, that turmoil will only be the broken down bus on the highway of your life. It will impede your acceleration towards your truest self. And finding your truest self is the key to any form of contentment.
I am not suggesting that happiness is possible for all of us, or that willful ignorance to the horrors of the world or your personal struggles is the key to unlocking your potential. But I am conveying as forcefully and as loving as I can that you do not need to look for trouble. You do not need to purposely indulge in scenarios that hurt because you believe the ache of your bruises is the heartbeat of your creative force. If you live in this world, you will suffer. You can count on that, and you do not need to compound that inevitable strife with your own mistaken beliefs or self-destructive actions.
Your job as a writer is to create. Your job as a human being is to live as fully as possible. My biggest wish and blessing for you is a life of laughter, a life of fuck-ups and fun, a life of fumbling and bumbling and vertiginous giddiness, a life that does not seek pain but when it inevitably comes instead seeks to learn from it, and to write it all down so someone else can understand and recognize themselves and feel less alone. I wish you just enough pain to grow, and more than enough strength to overcome it all and send it back to us in words and words and words.
On the same note, having privileges or good luck doesn’t mean you should feel bad for having them, especially to the point you think you ought to suffer like everyone else to feel like you belong.
Embrace your privileges and good luck. Then help others.
Pain is so inevitable and so unnecessary that I think as artists we need to feel like it has purpose by making it into art.
As a teenager I used to crave pain as I thought it would make me "better", but then when the pain came I was like a young apprentice who had dabbled too far into the dark arts, I was shaken by the loss of control.
There is a lot we can learn from our pain and suffering and experiences, but we have to be respectful of them. We firstly have to be respectful of ourselves.