"But then there is its abandoned cousin - discomfort. In the misery hierarchy we all love to build, discomfort has some pretty low-key PR. There is no feeling superior here, there only is." Loved this bit, P. So true. In my fauji upbringing, I've found living with pain/discomfort glorified on an everyday basis. That created a strange aspirational/denial relationship that continues to this day when my 30s body clearly can't deny it... I like this frenemy option... I think we can co-exist:)
Thankyou P, and thankyou Sonya Huber, and thankyou pain, for showing the way so very eloquently. Frenemy is such a nice relationship for pain - that push and pull, that oxymoronic (sometimes plain moronic) irony, that unresolvedness. Not glorified, not about-to-get-fixed. Just the kind of relationship with pain that I wish I had been shown while I was growing up and older (and not by pain itself :D).
It's much easier to go easy on yourself when you stop chafing with the ever-present pain/ discomfort/ suffering, as you describe so wonderfully. I spent my young adult life so enamored by pain in my imagination (makes an artist myth) and so terrified-avoidant in real life (deny or fix at all cost approach), that when a teacher of meditation said to me casually, "Pain is also just a sensation", I felt my world come briefly into very sharp focus before crashing nicely. What in the world, I wondered, has ever taught us to go towards pain, as it is? Thanks for taking that road hardly travelled, T and P!
"My Mister" is definitely one of the best K-dramas I have ever watched (and I've watched many of them!). Many K-dramas, including "My Mister," treat pain, loneliness, and such as communal, interpersonal experience. And understanding the fact that we all are inter-connected through this communal experience is what gives everyone involved (the characters and the viewers) the healing. I think the ways in which pains/sadness/loneliness are depicted in K-dramas have do to with what we call "han" in Korea. It is an emotional experience/expression that is bit tricky to explain, but Koreans know and feel it when we hear it. It is an expression of the complex feeling that embraces both sadness and hope, historical and social suffering intertwined with individual experience (we consider it a uniquely Korean emotion/pain and find its origin from the history of political and colonial oppression). ;)
"But then there is its abandoned cousin - discomfort. In the misery hierarchy we all love to build, discomfort has some pretty low-key PR. There is no feeling superior here, there only is." Loved this bit, P. So true. In my fauji upbringing, I've found living with pain/discomfort glorified on an everyday basis. That created a strange aspirational/denial relationship that continues to this day when my 30s body clearly can't deny it... I like this frenemy option... I think we can co-exist:)
Thankyou P, and thankyou Sonya Huber, and thankyou pain, for showing the way so very eloquently. Frenemy is such a nice relationship for pain - that push and pull, that oxymoronic (sometimes plain moronic) irony, that unresolvedness. Not glorified, not about-to-get-fixed. Just the kind of relationship with pain that I wish I had been shown while I was growing up and older (and not by pain itself :D).
It's much easier to go easy on yourself when you stop chafing with the ever-present pain/ discomfort/ suffering, as you describe so wonderfully. I spent my young adult life so enamored by pain in my imagination (makes an artist myth) and so terrified-avoidant in real life (deny or fix at all cost approach), that when a teacher of meditation said to me casually, "Pain is also just a sensation", I felt my world come briefly into very sharp focus before crashing nicely. What in the world, I wondered, has ever taught us to go towards pain, as it is? Thanks for taking that road hardly travelled, T and P!
"My Mister" is definitely one of the best K-dramas I have ever watched (and I've watched many of them!). Many K-dramas, including "My Mister," treat pain, loneliness, and such as communal, interpersonal experience. And understanding the fact that we all are inter-connected through this communal experience is what gives everyone involved (the characters and the viewers) the healing. I think the ways in which pains/sadness/loneliness are depicted in K-dramas have do to with what we call "han" in Korea. It is an emotional experience/expression that is bit tricky to explain, but Koreans know and feel it when we hear it. It is an expression of the complex feeling that embraces both sadness and hope, historical and social suffering intertwined with individual experience (we consider it a uniquely Korean emotion/pain and find its origin from the history of political and colonial oppression). ;)