i don’t tolerate pain well

I have said some version of this sentence for most of my life.

I tolerate pain well.

I’ve said it to doctors. I’ve said it to nurses. I’ve said it casually, almost as a fact about myself, the way someone might say they have a good memory or don’t get cold easily.

I tolerate pain well.

I’ve probably been a little too proud of it.

Today, while I was driving, I started wondering if I have been saying it wrong.

I was thinking about the pain I’ve been experiencing in my ankle. It’s significant. It’s there even when I’m sitting still, when I’m not walking on it, when I’m not doing anything that should aggravate it. I have another appointment with my doctor this week, and I was mentally preparing myself to explain what I’m experiencing.

And somewhere in that internal conversation came the familiar thought:

I tolerate pain well.

Except this time, instead of moving past it, something stopped me.

Because I suddenly remembered how I learned to tolerate pain.

When I was a child, being bad could mean being spanked. Sometimes it was a hand. Sometimes it was a belt. Sometimes it was a horse crop.

And there was a rule.

If I cried, the punishment could increase.

If I pulled away, the punishment could increase.

If I reacted too much to what was hurting me, there could be more of the same thing that was hurting me.

Then I went to school.

Corporal punishment was still permitted when I was in elementary and middle school. There were wooden paddles. Some had holes drilled into them, a design intended to make being struck with them hurt more.

And there, adults taught essentially the same lesson.

React, and the punishment increases.

So I learned.

Of course I learned.

But sitting in my car today, decades later, I found myself asking a question I don’t think I had ever asked myself before:

What exactly did I learn?

Did I learn to tolerate pain? Or did I learn not to show it?

Those are not the same thing.

There’s something unsettling about realizing that a characteristic you’ve carried into adulthood, and perhaps even taken pride in, may have begun as a survival strategy.

I’ve always thought of my pain tolerance as evidence I’m tough. Resilient. Strong. I can take a lot.

And that’s true.

I’m not interested in replacing one overly simple story with another. Discovering when something may have originated doesn’t automatically make the thing itself false.

I can withstand a lot of pain.

But today I realized there is additional information attached to that fact.

I learned very young that showing pain could result in more pain.

And as I sat with that realization, I’ve recognized something else.

It wasn’t only showing pain that could make things worse.

It was resisting it.

Pulling away.

Trying to protect myself.

Trying to get away from the thing that hurt.

Resistance could mean more.

So could crying.

So could moving.

The lesson wasn’t simply don’t let them know it hurts.

It was also:

Don’t fight it.

Take it.

Because reacting makes it worse.

Somewhere very young, pain, stillness and endurance became tangled together.

Maybe I didn’t just become good at hiding pain.

Maybe I learned how to remain still inside it.

Maybe I learned that sometimes the fastest way through something painful was not to fight what was happening, but to endure it till it stopped.

That’s a different thing from having a high pain tolerance.

And it’s a difficult thing to recognize as something I learned before I was old enough to understand what I was learning.

So maybe what I’ve been calling pain tolerance all these years is, at least partly, something else.

Maybe I became very good at hurting quietly. And somewhere along the way, I put a bow around that and called it strength.

I’ve been thinking a lot about honesty.

A few months ago, I wrote a song called honest answer. It came from realizing how automatically I answer the question “How are you?” with “I’m fine.” or “I’m okay.”

They’re extraordinarily convenient answers.

Most of us know the exchange.

“How are you?”

“Good. You?”

“Good.”

And everyone gets to keep moving.

But I started experimenting with not doing that.

If I wasn’t okay, I tried not to say I was.

That didn’t mean telling everyone everything. Sometimes it meant giving a slightly more honest answer.

“I’ve had a rough day.”

“I’m struggling a little.”

“Honestly, not great.”

Small sentences, but surprisingly difficult ones.

Eventually, I told someone that I wasn’t doing well, and I was told that what I was doing was manipulation.

That experience hurt deeply.

Not simply because of what was said, but because of something I didn’t understand about myself yet.

I had done the thing I was trying to learn to do. I had said: This hurts.

And somehow, once again, the fact that I had expressed pain became part of the problem.

I want to be careful here.

These experiences are not equivalent. An adult relationship is not my childhood. A painful interaction between two adults is not the same thing as a child being struck with a belt or a horse crop. I have choices now that I didn’t have then.

But experiences don’t have to be identical to echo one another.

Sometimes, something happens in the present and an old lesson recognizes the sound.

There is a line in honest answer that I understand differently today than I did when I wrote it:

“This is what the truth sounds like / when I finally stop performing strength.”

I still believe that line. Completely. But I know more about it now.

When I wrote it, I was thinking about the exhausting performance of being okay. About smiling, functioning, showing up, carrying things, handling things, and becoming so practiced at appearing strong that honesty begins to feel almost unnatural.

Today I find myself wondering how far back that performance actually goes.

Maybe I didn’t simply learn to be strong… maybe somewhere very early, I learned that silence looked like strength.

Don’t cry.

Don’t pull away.

Don’t react.

Take it.

Because reacting makes it worse.

That’s a very different origin story for something I’ve spent decades describing as toughness.

And now I wonder whether what I called strength wasn’t only the ability to endure…

Maybe part of it was the ability not to resist.

To hold still.

To absorb.

To wait for something painful to be over rather than risk making it worse by fighting against it.

And it makes me wonder how many times I’ve mistaken the absense of visible pain, or visible resistance, for evidence of strength, including in myself.

There is another thing I’ve learned since writing that song.

Honesty doesn’t mean everyone is entitled to the honest answer.

There are still people I will tell I’m fine, but something about that has changed, too.

There is a difference between:

“I’m fine because I’m afraid to tell you that I’m not.”

and

“I’m not fine, but I’ve decided that I’m not telling you.”

The words may be identical; the person saying them isn’t.

One can be silence imposed by fear. The other can be a door I have chosen to close.

That’s a distinction I couldn’t have written into honest answer when I wrote it because I hadn’t learned it yet.

It doesn’t make the original song wrong. It makes the song older.

And me three months older with it.

Maybe that’s one of the strange things about making art from your life.

Sometimes you write the truth before you understand everything the truth contains.

But this really isn’t about a song, and I’m beginning to think it isn’t entirely about pain either, because once I questioned this one thing I’ve always believed about myself, an uncomfortable question followed:

What else have I named incorrectly?

What else do I call a personality trait that began as an adaptation?

What else do I call a strength without knowing what it cost me to acquire it?

And I don’t think that question belongs only to people with stories like mine.

Maybe yours isn’t pain.

Maybe you’re fiercely independent.

Maybe everyone admires that you never need anything from anybody.

But have you ever wondered when you learned not to need anyone?

Maybe you’re incredibly good at reading a room/.

You notice tiny changes in someone’s voice. A facial expression. A shift in energy. You know something is wrong before anyone says a word.

Maybe that’s simply a remarkable capacity for empathy.

Or maybe once upon a time when knowing what mood someone was in before they told you mattered.

Maybe you’re the easygoing one, the person who doesn’t make demands. The person who adapts. The person everyone describes as easy to be around.

Maybe that’s genuinely part of who you are.

But maybe it’s worth wondering when you learned that taking up less space made things easier.

I don’t think every strength is secretly a wound.

And I don’t think discovering that something began in survival means we have to stop valuing what it eventually became.

That feels too simple.

Some things we learned because we had to may have become real and valuable parts of who we are.

Maybe the more interesting question isn’t is this actually a strength?

Maybe it’s where did I learn it?

I still don’t know what I’m going to say the next time someone tells me I tolerate pain well.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe I’ll still occasionally say it myself, because, in one sense, it’s true. I can withstand a tremendous amount of pain.

What changed today is that I’m no longer sure that’s the whole story.

There’s a child somewhere in the history of that sentence who learned that crying could make another strike come.

There is a school-aged kid who learned that reacting to the paddle could mean more punishment.

There is an adult who became very good at carrying things without showing how heavy they were.

And there is me, sitting with an ankle that hurts even when I’m not moving it, finally wondering whether being able to ensure pain and being okay with pain were ever the same thing.

They weren’t.

Maybe strength isn’t measured by how quietly we can bleed.

Maybe resilience isn’t just how much we can withstand.

Maybe it’s also worth asking whether endurance was freely chosen, or whether somewhere along the way we learned that resistance would cost us more.

And maybe some of the things we’re proudest of surviving deserve something more complicated than pride.

Maybe they deserve curiosity, compassion, even grief, because sometimes survival leaves us with extraordinary abilities. And sometimes we become so proud of being good at them that we never stop to ask why we had to become good at them in the first place.

So I’m asking now, not because I want to take my strength away from myself, but because I want to know it all.. where it came from, what it gave me, what it cost me…

And whether I still need to pay that price.

I don’t think I tolerate pain well.

I think I learned how to survive it.

And I’m only beginning to understand the difference.