My Pain is Worse than Yours...

I have learned something very important since being sick; that my pain is worse than anything that anyone else is going through. I can prove it. Start to tell me about what you are going through or tell me about a struggle you are going through and I will compare it to me and because I cant really experience what you are experiencing I will know that mine is worse than yours. Don’t tell me that you don’t feel the same way when someone starts to talk about what they are going through and you have challenges of your own. I am being funny about this, but it really is interesting how we compare pain with others when we are going through something in our lives. This type of comparing really show us mentally where we are and if we are focusing on the pain in our lives more than being grateful that we were able to wake up and live another day. I call it “the perspective of our pain” and it is a dangerous place to be emotionally. That place is like an emotional quicksand that is impossible to escape without the power of God to get out of. It isolates us and keeps us from caring about others and the things that they go through because we are so worried about our crap. I used to think that to get people to pray for me that I needed to fill people in on all the gory details of my eye and what I was going through. To make sure that they got my “perspective of pain” and felt sorry for me so that they would “lift me up to God”. I realize now that that is a poor way to get people to pray for me and what I am going through. I was at the eye clinic a few months ago and had a new technician that was helping me and was asking questions about my condition and she said “I know how you feel”. Mentally for about three seconds I was like “uh, no you don’t. You haven’t experienced this and who are you to say that you know how I feel? I have been on prednisone for two years, have a foraging squirrel face and the possibility of a whole list of physical problems that can develop just from the medication I am on to keep my eye from rotting out of my head. Don’t tell me that you know how I feel!” My perspective of pain. While I was yelling at this lady in my head, she started to tell me about her son who had dealt with multiple physical problems and had been on prednisone for the past 16 years and was only in his late 20’s. I then shut up, stopped my mental yelling and had a paradigm shift in my perspective of pain. It doesn’t make the pain I feel hurt any less, but realizing that other people go through stuff worse than mine helps me to keep my perspective and attitude in check.