why do we romanticize suffering?

The cold kitchen floor digs into the flesh of my bare thighs. I sob against the pale furniture and wait for its touch to warm my shattered heart. Each sob fades into a murmur that tries to convince me that this is my so-called character development and that I should be grateful because it has made me the person I am today.

A nearly nonexistent part of me that tries to break through from within whispers that going through hell isn’t a prerequisite for being someone of value, and that pain is just pain. I stifle that voice and crunch it under my fingers. I try to take deep breaths, but the air burns my throat. I hug my legs and lie completely still.

Instead of listening to it, I just do what I always do. I look for Sylvia Plath. I revisit The Bell Jar, which I’ve read three times already. I skim through a couple of pages and feel an absurd, almost embarrassing relief. I think she would have understood. If she had lived long enough and we had met, she would have looked at me for five minutes and known exactly what to say. My mind starts scheming and gets to the conclusion that no one has ever managed to put into words what I feel like she has.

Next come Anne Sexton, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Virginia Woolf. I start collecting them as if they are a group of imagined friends who wait for me every night on my nightstand. I become convinced that we belong to the very same category of women and share some hereditary sorrow that no one fully understands. I begin reading them searching for reassurance and subsequently find myself looking for proof. I delightfully underline every sentence that remotely resembles me with youthful relish. You see? I’m like that, too.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that Esther Greenwood and I suffer from the same affliction of the soul—that our misery has the same consistency, the same severity, and the same implications, even though we’re so incredibly far apart. For a few minutes, I stop feeling like a girl crying on her kitchen floor and become the protagonist in a story where nothing ends well.

On nights when I barely feel like picking up something and reading, I devote the rest of my time to sit by the window and allow someone else to do the thinking for me. When my earphones find my ears, I know it’s my duty to search for melancholic songs. I listen to each of them, one after another, sometimes repeating the same one more than once hoping that my mood gets even worse.

I look out the window as the lights in the buildings fade, and for a moment, my life stops feeling like a succession of mundane events. The music transforms my sadness into a scene. My tears cease to be tears and become part of a carefully edited sequence. I manage to observe my own misery from the outside and find myself imagining how someone else would see me in that moment. I wonder what they would think of me and how much compassion they would feel.

I wish that, for once, the burden of my anguish would be so transparent that no one could remain oblivious to it. Other losses and other mournings do not exist. Only mine exists. Only mine matters. My turmoil expands until it suffuses the entire room and ends up presenting itself as the only legitimate tragedy that has ever truly occurred.

Only much later do I begin to wonder if I really wanted to stop suffering.

I’ve always felt a strange fascination with my own sadness and everything that came after running out of breath from crying. The idea that all this anguish was expanding some invisible part of me and that it was making me more observant or interesting. More worthy of being read.

And then I start to ask myself something I’d never dared to ask before.

Why am I doing this?

Why do I need to convince myself that my pain is making me a better person? Why do I cling to women who’ve written from a place of suffering, as if their words were evidence that mine will come someday, too? Why do I rather think I’m going through a particularly unfortunate chapter in my life instead of accepting that, perhaps, I’m simply unhappy?

You romanticize suffering because the alternative is unbearable—and sometimes even boring. Especially if it lacks a narrative thread. So, to fight it tooth and nail, you invent a purpose for it because it’s terrifying to admit that the anguish haunting you isn’t always the prelude to an epiphany. You turn it into a myth because that way—by giving it the name of Plath or Pizarnik—your pathetic tragedy ceases to be a humiliation and becomes a ritual worthy of admiration.

You’ve built your identity so close to the abyss that stability now seems like a flat desert with no one to call upon at midnight. You’ve grown tired of telling yourself the story of the tragic heroine so many times that the idea of feeling better sounds, paradoxically, vulgar.

Hang up the costumes of tragedy. The function is over.

This article was inspired by a note I wrote a few weeks ago. It’s a concept I’ve wanted to explore on several occasions, but I never dared to write as something longer than just a short note.

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