2171: Pain

There are many types of pain in the world. There’s physical pain, which can range from mildly annoying to excruciating and debilitating. There’s mental pain, which, likewise, can range from occasionally distracting to life-consuming. There’s emotional pain, which ranges from feeling a bit blue to wanting to end your own existence.

Few things compare to the pain you feel when helpless to do anything to help someone you love, though. This pain cuts deep, right through your very soul, and threatens to rip out the very core of your being. It’s as excruciating, life-consuming and debilitating as all of the very worst the other kinds of pain have to offer, with the added joy that there’s absolutely no way whatsoever to treat it. If there were, you wouldn’t be feeling it in the first place.

Mostly this pain stems from a position of impotence: a position of complete powerlessness to do anything to help resolve that which is causing your special person anguish. It’s the frustration at not knowing what to do, and at the things you do try not being enough or not working. It’s the realisation that there really is nothing you can do but watch as someone else suffers, and just hope that people who are better qualified to sort things out are able to sort things out — or, in the worst possible circumstances, that things will just resolve themselves somehow.

I do not know how to deal with that pain, and I am suffering dreadfully from it. And I feel bad bringing it up, because the pain I feel is something intangible that is a consequence of someone who is physically suffering. But it’s there, nonetheless, and it probably needs “treatment” of some sort just as much as the physical pain does.

I don’t even know where to begin, though. Let’s hope that the old saying about time healing all wounds is really true.