Same Pain, Different Freight
It is 5 a.m. and the sun is rising.
I have been watching stupid drama all night. Not because it is interesting. Not because the plot has me. Not because I am secretly delighted. I am watching because there is an abyss I cannot fill, an emptiness sitting in the next room of my chest, and if I close my eyes — if I allow the quiet — the abyss will speak. I would rather be exhausted tomorrow. I would rather have a Saturday murky and useless and half-conscious than a Saturday in which I have to meet my own hollowness. The drama is not pleasure. The drama is a curtain.
Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow I will not have meetings. I will not have the influx of tasks, the tension, the work-oblivion that carries me through the weekdays without quite letting me notice the screaming. That is the whole point. The work week is one kind of oblivion. The Friday-night binge is another. Each one defends against the moment the other might fail. Together they cover the whole calendar.
This is the bill the body has been paying.
For years I called it different things. Stress. Hormones. Bad sleep hygiene. Anxiety. Modern life. I tried better food, then less food. I tried meditation. I tried earlier bedtimes. I tried therapy. I tried more discipline. I tried more rest. I tried more chocolate. I tried a different career within the same career. Every name was true in its small way and missed the larger thing. The symptoms were not separate problems with separate solutions. They were one defense system speaking in many tongues. The work-week busyness. The weekend binge. The 5 a.m. dawn at the wrong end of the night. The sleeplessness on the nights between. They were not failures of discipline. They were succeeding at exactly what they had been recruited for: keeping me away from the abyss.
The abyss is this: the life is not the one the body was made for.
The bill
I do not know where this knowing comes from. I have no clean story for its origin — no single event, no neat diagnosis. It might be developmental, it might be ancestral, it might be the simple math of a finite life lived sideways. I have stopped trying to source it. The point is: it is real. The body knows what the mind has not yet named. The physician Gabor Maté has been writing about this for decades — that chronic stress, especially the stress of suppressing the authentic self in order to belong, has costs the body eventually presents in the form of disease (Maté, 2003). The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk titled his most well-known book The Body Keeps the Score, and meant it almost literally (van der Kolk, 2014). The score is not abstract. It comes due in hormones. In immunity. In sleep. In the way food sits or refuses to sit. In how often the heart races over nothing. In the way the sun rising over your shoulder at 5 a.m. on a Saturday feels less like a beginning and more like a verdict.
The hospice nurse Bronnie Ware, after years sitting at the bedsides of the dying, named the top regret of her patients in one sentence (Ware, 2011): I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself. Not love. Not money. Not work-life balance. A life true to myself. The implication, which polite culture mostly swallows, is that most people do not live one.
If you are reading this and your body has been paying this bill, you already know.
You do not need me to tell you. Your weekends do not actually rest you. Your Friday nights end at 5 a.m. with the sun coming up and the kind of exhaustion that does not feel earned. Your job sits on your chest at 5 p.m. on Sunday like a small loud animal. You scroll, you stream, you snack, you do anything that keeps you from the silence. You have been telling yourself stories about the symptoms — I am tired because I work hard, I just like the show, I just need a break — and the stories are not lies, exactly. They are simply not the whole truth. The whole truth is heavier. The whole truth is that something in you knows what it is here to do, and is not doing it, and is bleeding quiet protest into every room of your house. Some of the protest is loud enough you have to keep the television on all night to drown it out.
The reframe
I want to tell you what changed for me. Not the symptoms. The symptoms are slower. What changed first is the framing.
I had thought, for most of my life, that I should find a passion, the way the culture frames it — a bright butterfly feeling, an inexhaustible enthusiasm, a sense of being lifted out of bed by the work. I asked the question, repeatedly: do I feel inexhaustible enthusiasm about this? and the answer was always no, because no one ever feels that, about anything, for years on end. Enthusiasm is a weather. It is not a climate. The cultural definition of passion is rigged to fail.
Mark Manson, in a blog post that has aged well, said the question is wrong from the start (Manson, 2014). Don’t ask what you love. Ask what kind of suffering you are willing to do. What flavor of shit sandwich would you tolerate? Everyone is eating one. The only choice is which.
The reframe is small and brutal. Passion is not enthusiasm. Passion is the suffering you are willing to choose.
This sounds bleak when you first read it. It is not bleak. It is the kindest sentence I know about adult life. Because what it says is: you will suffer either way. The suffering is not optional. The only thing that is optional is what you suffer for. You can suffer the unlived life — the 5 a.m. dawn after the all-night binge, the abyss you keep the screen lit against, the bill the body keeps paying — or you can suffer the calling. The lost evenings. The discomfort of being seen. The terror of writing a sentence and pressing publish. The income uncertainty. The unwearable old performances. The conversations with your family that no longer translate. All of that is also suffering. But it is suffering toward something.
Same finite years. Completely different freight.
Sweet suffering
I came to this slowly. The way I came to it was by paying attention to which suffering felt sweet — sweet in the strange way the contemplatives mean, the way grief at a beloved’s bedside is sweet even when it is unbearable, because the bedside is the right place to be. The daily writing is sweet suffering for me. The work day is not. The honest conversation with my husband about visibility is sweet suffering. The small dishonesties of polite life are not. The body knew which was which long before the mind did.
Viktor Frankl, who knew this from inside the concentration camp, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that meaning is what distinguishes redemptive suffering from destructive suffering (Frankl, 1946/2006). Same nervous system, same hours of the night. But the heart opens in the dark hour when the suffering carries meaning, and closes when it carries nothing. This is not metaphor. The body knows the difference. You can feel it in your chest.
What Musk meant
At South by Southwest in 2013, Elon Musk said: I’d like to die on Mars. Just not on impact (Musk, 2013). The line is delivered as a joke and lands as one. But the joke contains a claim most people miss because they have no idea how to hear it. He is not saying he wishes for death. He is saying he wants the last hour of his finite life to take place inside the work he came to do, not outside it. The punchline is what makes the underlying sentence bearable to say in public — I want my dying to be done in the right place is too naked a thing to say at a tech conference, so the joke does the social work of letting the claim through. From inside the body that has felt the unlived-life pain, the joke is not posturing. It is arithmetic. The pain of not-attempting reliably exceeds the pain of attempting. To end your life inside the work you came to do is on the less suffering side of the ledger. It is not heroic. It is rational. It is the math of a person who has finally looked at both columns and seen which one is heavier.
If your body has been telling you the truth and you have been answering with snacks and Netflix and another season of a show you do not actually like, this is the point at which the answering stops working. You will not be able to numb your way out forever. The bill keeps coming, larger each year. Eventually it comes due in disease, in marriage failure, in the kind of depression that wears down even the willing, in the body simply refusing to keep up the pretense.
What stops needing the oblivions
So here is what I would say to you, if you are sitting in your own living room at 5 a.m. with the sun rising and a screen still bright and a chest still loud.
The work is not to manufacture passion. The work is not to wake up loving your job. The work is to look honestly at what your body has been paying for, and to ask whether you are willing to pay a different price. The same finite years are spent either way. You do not get a refund on the suffering. You only get a choice about the freight.
Pick the suffering that moves you.
You will know it by what stops requiring the oblivions. When the work itself is the calling, the work-week numbing is no longer necessary; the busyness has somewhere to go that is not the dampener of a screaming chest. When the calling fills the Saturday hours, the Friday-night binge no longer has to defend the morning. The oblivions are not bad habits. They are protections. They will release their grip when the abyss they were protecting you against is being met by something other than them.
The suffering that moves you is the suffering you can sit with at 5 a.m. without reaching for the remote. The suffering that kills you is the kind you must keep numbing to survive. They are not the same. The body knows the difference long before the mind allows itself to say it out loud.
The freight
If you are reading this and something in you just nodded — quietly, almost involuntarily — you already know which is which. You have known for a while. The 5 a.m. dawn knows. The screen knows. The screaming chest knows.
The only remaining question is whether you will keep paying the bill you have been paying, or whether you will start paying a different one.
I am still inside this decision myself. The writing you are reading is part of how I am paying the new bill. The old bill is still around — there are still Friday nights when the screen wins — but less, and with more guilt than relief, which is its own progress. The freight is changing, even when the weight is not. That is what I have to offer you. Not a destination. A different direction in the same finite life. A choice about which suffering is yours to choose.
Same pain. Different freight.
Bibliography
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning (I. Lasch, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946.) ISBN 978-0807014271. Available: Beacon Press
Manson, M. (2014). Screw Finding Your Passion [Blog post]. markmanson.net. Available: markmanson.net/screw-finding-your-passion
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Knopf Canada. ISBN 978-0676973129 (Vintage Canada softcover, 2004). Available: Dr. Maté’s book page
Musk, E. (2013, March 10). I’d like to die on Mars. Just not on impact [SXSW Interactive keynote]. Austin Convention Center, Austin, TX. Reported by The Drum and The Hollywood Reporter.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. ISBN 978-0143127741. Available: Penguin Random House
Ware, B. (2011). The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. Hay House. ISBN 978-1401956004 (revised edition, 2019). Available: Hay House