One Person's Desire Is Another Person's Pain

I've been seeing a lot of people talking about past pains and traumas online of late, and am beginning to see that a) often we have similar experiences but attribute them to different reasons and b) one person's desire is another person's pain.

The first point is kind of a different ramble and tends to get people angry in that they identify with the reason they peg as the cause for their troubles more than the experience itself - so like, if someone was bullied because they were fat and another person was bullied because they were gay, often they won't relate to each other in a "you don't know what it's like" kind of way even if their bullies were the exact same kind of asshole and they were bullied in very similar ways. I feel like I'm brewing A Thought about that tendency of ours, but it's not quite done yet. So today I'd like to discuss the second point: what one person may long for and imagine as wonderful, another person who has that hates that and can't imagine why anyone would want to be treated that way or experience that thing.

Today's meme theme is going to be variations on the arguing with a cat meme, because I can

So for example, a child who has neglectful parents might look at their friend with strict but loving parents and be envious, because that kid's parents care and pay attention. Meanwhile, their friend thinks it must be great to have such neglectful parents that you can do whatever you want and not get in trouble because they just aren't paying any attention to you. The kid with neglectful parents wants to be loved and cared about; the kid with strict parents wants some freedom. Neither sees the downsides of the other's plight.

One kid might have parents who make them go to cultural/religious events and they hate it. They think they are boring and would rather be out playing with their friends. They are envious of their friends who get to play in the park when they have to go to church/temple/mosque. But their friend in the park might be envious that they have that culture to participate in, when their own family never does anything but watch television and they really want a place where they feel like they belong. Those people at the church/temple/mosque always seem so happy and nice and they have such cool festivals.

It's the old "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" idea, but sometimes it goes way beyond envy and into deep emotional wounds.

I've seen straight women who don't get a lot of male attention be jealous of others who do, even if those others don't want it. They have been made to feel bad about themselves their whole lives as "undesirable" for whatever reason, and all they want is a little social validation and to be seen as beautiful, which is fair. But when you tell the lesbian that she is lucky for being harassed by straight men, or the trans man that he is lucky for being harassed by straight men, because that's what you imagine is nice but they find abhorrent, that's not cool. When someone who has been attacked on the street, chased and stalked and followed and assaulted, is told how "lucky" they are to be pretty and attract male attention, you are wounding them further. Both have been made to feel bad about their bodies; but one has been told they are "ugly" and the other has been told they are an object to be used whether they like it or not. Two wholly different woundings; two wholly different reactions to a given circumstance: to the first, a man catcalling "hey, beautiful" at her might make her feel confident and pretty that day; to the second, it might make her feel afraid and gross.

As we work through our healing and our shadows, we often unearth these wounded parts and jealousies, and we have to be careful not to dump our own pain into the laps of those who have the other end of the stick. If your friend is venting to you about how suffocated by their overprotective parents they feel, that is not the time to tell them how lucky they have it because your parents wouldn't care if you fell off a cliff. You may genuinely feel that way and wish your parents were as worried about you as theirs, but simultaneously your friend can feel controlled and infantalized and these two perspectives can exist at the same time. One is not "wrong" and the other "right," because this is a subjective feeling about lived experience, not an objective observation about the temperature of water. It may come to pass that one day your friend with the overprotective parents has a different perspective on it and believes then that their parents truly were just doing their best to care for them and not be bitter about it anymore, but it's just as likely that they'll go to their grave feeling like it was all just Too Much. And that change, or not, does not invalidate the feelings they have in the present. We are all living in the infinite Now, and cannot gain the perspective we might have in twenty years without living through those twenty years. Gaining that perspective does not erase the previous one, just as climbing the stairs to the 4th floor does not make the 1st through 3rd floors not real or not important.

It may also be true that if you and your friend had switched places at an early enough stage, you too would feel as though their parents were too strict and they would feel that your parents really didn't care, because our opinions are shaped by our experiences. Maybe at age 15 you'd like to change places and each of you would thrive in the other environment, but if you had switched at age 5 you both might feel exactly as the other does right now. You can't know, because we can only experience one reality at a time.

I have in my own life often been envious of what other people considered their problems, while at the same time having people tell me I was lucky for suffering through something I hated. There is no hard and fast rule about what is good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, appealing or disgusting. Some people like cilantro, and some people think it tastes like soap. It's the same plant, but two very different experiences of it. Life is like that. About the big things and the little things.

Maybe one day we'll all pass through the veil and have a unified consciousness, and we'll know how everyone else felt about all their different experiences. But until then, we can only know our tiny little scope of reality, and I'm doing my best to overcome that tendency to judge and just believe others when they tell me what something is like from their perspective. I'm not always successful. It takes practice. But if we all try it, maybe we'll all heal a little bit better because we'll feel heard by the people in our lives, which is so important.

I have no idea what the meaning of life is, or the meaning of suffering, or why we're all here. Humans are weird and wonderful, kind and cruel. We're all just winging it and doing the best we can. Sometimes we fuck up. Often, we fuck up. But we can try our best to help each other, and tend each others' wounds. Sometimes, healing a wound is as simple as acceptance and love, hearing and believing. You may think someone has everything you could ever dream of, but they may be covered in scars you know nothing about. Let's extend each other a little grace.