✧ the paradox of suffering ✧

It’s strange how pain insists  

on being both a wound  

and a teacher.  

How it can hollow you out  

and still claim it’s making room  

for something else.  

We spend years trying to outrun it,  

as if distance could rewrite  

what the heart already knows.  

But suffering has a way  

of sitting beside us  

like an old, uninvited companion—  

quiet, persistent,  

asking questions we don’t want to answer.  

Why do we break  

in the exact places  

we swore were unbreakable?  

Why does healing feel  

so much like learning to walk  

on unfamiliar ground?  

Maybe the paradox is this:  

pain doesn’t just hurt—  

it reveals.  

It shows us the edges of ourselves,  

the limits, the longings,  

the truths we only admit  

when everything else falls away.  

And somehow,  

in the middle of all that ache,  

we keep choosing to stay.  

To breathe.  

To try again.  

As if some part of us knows  

that suffering is not the end—  

just the doorway  

we never wanted  

but still walk through.  

-LR 🖤