The Diary of a Struggling Genderfluid: 2

Pain

How do you put a measure to pain?

Sure, maybe you can think that one thing hurt less than something else you experienced. But, how do you explain this amount of pain to someone else, when they themselves have no knowledge what kinds of pain you've experienced? Maybe you've had a ruptured spleen before, and has to get it removed, and that was the worst pain you've ever experienced in your life. Say another person has suffered a broken finger as their worst amount of pain. You break your finger, and find that it isn't the end of the world. You then end up trivializing the other person's pain, because to you, nothing was worse than rupturing your spleen.

You see? How can you put a measure to it, when it is different for everyone? And the more you go on and experience pain, the less you can seem to distinguish the pains from one another. I personally, have broken my arm, and I have also fallen out of a tree and sprained both my foot and knee at the same time. I know I experienced extreme pain in both instances, but can I really compare the pains to one another? They both seem equal in my mind, but I broke my arm so long ago that I cannot remember. The pain of the leg injury is relatively fresh in my mind, and still bothers me to this day. How do I compare the pains?

Also, the longer we go without experiencing serious pain, the more we forget it. Then, when something major happens, we think, 'this is it, this pain is insurmountable, surely the worst I've experienced'. Once you recover, it may be years later something serious happens again, and you think again, 'this is it, this pain is insurmountable, surely the worst I've experienced'. How then can you truly measure which was worse?

I wonder also if age effects how we feel pain and how we remember it. You were surely hurt somehow as a child, whether you fell and cracked your head open or something else happened. Do you remember though? Especially if you were quite young? Maybe that pain was the worst you've experienced, but how will you know if you can't recall the memory of the pain? Then possibly, you've experienced pain that is worse, but feel that a different pain is worse because you remember it better.

And, how do we compare physical pains to mental ones?

If one has experienced a serious wound, perhaps a surgery of some sort, can we somehow compare it with someone who has lost a friend or family member? Or maybe someone is suffering depression, how can someone who has only experienced bad physical pain truly understand the depths of mental pain? How do we say 'losing someone is like (some kind of physical pain)'? It's like comparing apples to oranges. We can't. So how do we translate mental pain into a measurable scale, when all we have to compare it to is something completely different?

I'm supposed to be doing my homework right now.

Grey out. (neutral)