How Suffering Becomes a Place to Hide

This is an uncomfortable question: why do we continue doing something that makes us suffer?

Because there have been times in my life when I could see, with painful clarity, that I was suffering and that I was also somehow unwilling to stop. I knew I was in the swamp. I could even see the wildflower meadow around it, and still I kept running circles in the mud, increasingly furious about the fact that I was running circles in the mud.

How do I stop doing this? How do I get out? How do I surrender?

It took me a long time to understand that suffering had become much more than something happening to me. It had become an entire structure around which my attention, identity and life could organize themselves.

I don’t believe pain itself is suffering. Pain hurts. Loss hurts. Grief can tear through the entire body. Fear can move through us, uncertainty can leave us standing without answers, and mortality asks us to live knowing that everything we love will eventually change form. Suffering begins when I enter into conflict with what is, when reality becomes something I cannot allow to be as it is.

There is reality, and then there is my argument with reality.

But underneath even this resistance, I have found something deeper. The original resistance is resistance to myself.

That sounds almost absurd at first. How could I resist myself? I am myself. And that is precisely where it gets interesting, because what if the person I have learned to call “me” is partly an identity constructed around everything I once discovered I needed to be in order to belong?

A child learns very quickly what is welcome. We learn which feelings are too much, which desires cause trouble, which truths disturb the room, which parts of us receive love and which create distance. When being fully ourselves threatens belonging, we do something extraordinarily intelligent: we adapt. We learn to contain, hide and reshape ourselves in ways that preserve connection.

Eventually the adaptation becomes so familiar that we no longer experience it as adaptation.

We experience it as ourselves.

Somewhere underneath it, however, remains a life that was never actually extinguished. The body knows when something is wrong long before the constructed identity is willing to admit it. Something in us knows when a relationship has ended internally, when we want to say no while our mouth keeps saying yes, when we are exhausted from performing a life we no longer belong to, or when a desire keeps returning no matter how many reasonable arguments we build against it.

I sometimes think suffering is the friction created by this division. The greater the distance becomes between what I deeply know myself to be and the life I am trying to maintain, the more energy is required to hold the structure together.

And suffering can become an extraordinary way of avoiding this conflict.

Give me a sufficiently difficult problem and I can pour my entire life force into solving it. My illness, my trauma, the person who hurt me, my past, my future, my healing, my endless process of becoming better. There is always something demanding my attention, something to understand, overcome, repair or control.

As long as I am fixing myself, I never have to encounter the terrifying possibility that my deepest task was never to become acceptable.

It was to stop abandoning myself.

This is also why healing itself can become another hiding place. I can spend years working on myself while quietly reinforcing the belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Every new method can become another promise of the person I will finally be when I have removed enough of what is currently here. The project can continue indefinitely while the life I was supposedly healing myself in order to live remains postponed.

So when I ask what suffering gives me, I no longer think the most interesting answer is attention, meaning, sympathy or even familiarity, although suffering can provide all of those things. It gives me somewhere to direct my attention so that I don’t have to look directly at myself.

Because looking at myself may threaten the identity that once kept me safe.

This is where the familiar hell can feel safer than the unknown heaven. Hell has a map. I know who I am there and I know what tomorrow requires of me: survive, analyze, repair, control, endure. My suffering may be unbearable, but at least it gives me a recognizable world.

If that world disappears, something far less predictable appears.

Freedom.

And freedom carries questions that suffering can postpone for a very long time. Who am I when there is nothing left to fix? What do I actually desire when I am no longer organizing my choices around fear? What would I create? What kind of life would emerge if all this energy were no longer required to keep myself contained?

What would I give this life to?

There is no old map for that place.

I think this is why surrender and will have had to find each other in me. Will alone kept me running through the swamp trying to conquer it. Even surrender became another task for a while, another thing I needed to succeed at so that I could finally escape myself.

Something changes when surrender and will stop pulling in opposite directions. Surrender allows me to recognize where I actually am without arguing with it, while will gives movement to what becomes possible from there. I no longer need my will to fight reality. I can use it to participate in life.

There was a time when my rage at my own suffering became part of that movement. I was furious with the swamp, furious with the circles, furious with being able to see what I was doing and still somehow continuing to do it. I think there was something sacred in that anger. It carried the first uncompromising recognition that I no longer wanted to give my life force to maintaining the very thing I desperately wanted freedom from.

This is one of the places where suffering begins to loosen its grip. Not because I have finally found the perfect method for escaping it, but because I become willing to see what all that resistance has been protecting me from.

Myself.

And then comes the surrender that all my attempts at surrender were preparing me for: allowing myself to approach the very thing I once learned might be dangerous to reveal. To discover, slowly and through experience, that what I had spent a lifetime hiding was never the thing that would destroy me.

It was the life in me that had been waiting to live.