Finding Meaning in Physical Suffering
It’s 5:42 AM. Outside, it’s still that peculiar, bluish darkness before the sun even thinks about rising. The room is quiet, but in this silence, the first thing to wake up isn’t my thoughts. It’s my body. Or rather - the pain. It doesn't need an alarm. It simply unfolds in the joints, in the back, under the skin, like a heavy, suffocating blanket pinning me to the mattress. In these first few minutes, the bed isn’t a place of rest; it’s a battlefield. The truth is, physical suffering is the loneliest thing in the world . You can have the most loving people around you, but at five in the morning, when you are hurting, you are absolutely alone in your own shell of skin. No one can carry even a milligram of that sensation for you. For a long time - weeks, maybe months - my first reaction was an endless, maddening question: Why? Why me? What did I do to deserve this? What did I break in my life that made my body decide to retaliate this way? I watched healthy people outside running...