The Pain Test

The tolerance for physical pain can tell you a lot about a person. How he handles a broken arm. A bruised body. The sheer discomfort of simply holding up. Because your body revolts when it is in pain. When something is broken, it constantly reminds you that it is broken. And so you have to process all of those signals, endlessly. The mechanism of pain is primitive. When something hurts, it reminds you that it does. It wants you to attend to it. It doesn't understand whether you are already at the hospital. Or whether you have taken the medicine. It keeps signalling the brain that something needs to be done. Which is relentless. This is the process that wears you down. Makes you brittle. Physical pain shows on your face. The constant ache becomes physically draining too. On one hand, your brain is firing off reminders. On the other, you have to communicate your pain to people. Walk them through the whole story. How it started. What you know. What you cannot quite express. This is…