"That name is life"

Trinity has posted at SM-Feminists, an awesome post about what pain can mean.

She concludes:

Pain and pleasure together have a name.

It's not a difficult name. It's not a strange name. It's not even a multisyllabic name. It's a nice and short little name that feels good in the mouth and on the lips and tongue.

That name is life.

Without a doubt, this captures the essence for me of why I love pain.

I would almost say that the people whom Trinity quotes, who claim pain is a sign that something is wrong, haven't felt pain in action, the way it's meant to be.

Pain for me is associated with living life, because when I live life, when I dare to go out there and give my all to something - sometimes, I aim for more than I can manage. Sometimes I crash and burn (figuratively speaking - Ren knows about burning literally). Sometimes it hurts (literally, physically, truly). Pain is a consequence of living, rather than just being alive. Pain is a consequence of staying alive, of fighting to stay alive. Pain is a consequence of every time that you stretch yourself to the limit, and it being a limit you can't see, sometimes you step over it. You can't live life without pain. A life without pain is a life that hasn't been lived.

I am proud to say that I have very few allergies (the only one I know for sure is penicillin and related antibiotics). Considering I do not take much notice of healthy eating or healthy lifestyles, I get sick very very rarely.

I put this down in large part to the fact that I "ate a lot of dirt" when I was young. by which I mean, I ran around a lot and fell over while doing so; I rode my bike like a maniac and more often than not fell off (not a summer went by without several grazed knees, and some of those involving blood, and sticking plasters, and then scabs, and picking the scabs, and eventually the wound healing...); I did dumb things and got burned (literally), got cut, got sprained ankles, got winded, got bruised... In short, growing up, I learned that when you live your life, you get hurt, and that's okay. It's a part of the deal, it doesn't mean something's wrong. Something's wrong is something like a broken leg, or worse. Which, sure, that's pain, too, but not all pain is bad. And then, again, when I was a teenager I was hit by a car; I have no recollection of pain (or indeed anything) from that; not even afterwards when I woke up in hospital. So "no pain" doesn't mean everything's okay either.

On top of that, of course, there is my experience with depression. Depression is the antithesis of pain, it really is. Everything is heavy, dulled, senseless, dead. It isn't pain, it's the pain of being without sensation, the pain of having no pain.

I wrote about this before, in "My Relationship with Pain".

Pain is not always bad. Pain doesn't always mean something's wrong. Sometimes, pain is how you know that something is right, and that things are working properly. And sometimes, pain is how you communicate.