Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You

Sometimes I wonder if the most profound kind of pain is the one you’ve never met.

That thought wouldn’t leave me the other night as I tried to fall asleep, thinking back to a conversation with my best friend a few months ago.

We were talking about someone we both know—someone who moves through life with this strange, effortless ease. They’re always composed, always pleasant.

Unmarked.

Like life never quite managed to bruise them. Not shallow, not fake—just… untouched. As though they’ve lived beside life rather than inside it.

My best friend said it first: “What do they know about pain?”

And there it was. The thing I’d been circling around without naming. Because I’d wondered the same. What do they know about the kind of pain that doesn’t just hurt but rearranges the architecture of your heart ? The pain that walks in uninvited and leaves you standing in the rubble of who you thought you were. The kind that isn’t poetic or meaningful when you’re in it—just cruel, relentless, and unforgiving.

The truth is, I don’t think they’ve ever known it. And maybe that’s why something about them feels flat.

They laugh, they talk, they live. But never fully

It made me realize something: pain is often talked about as something you survive. Get through it, push past it, heal, move on. But maybe the real purpose of pain isn’t survival—maybe it’s to give us dimension. To crack us open, to etch depth into us. To drag us so low that, when the light returns, we actually feel the warmth instead of just registering it. Pain doesn’t just break you; it shapes the contours of your emotional world. Without it, life becomes… smooth. And smooth surfaces don’t hold much. Water slides off them. Nothing sticks.

When you’ve never truly hurt, you experience life the way a gloved hand feels a surface. You can still go through the motions—hold, touch, move—but you never fully register the texture of it. Never feel the splinter of loss, the sting of disappointment, the undeniable grip of something that matters. And if you’ve never known the grip of something that matters, how can you ever fully appreciate its absence or its presence?

That’s what deeply unsettles me about that person.

It’s like watching someone live through a pane of glass. Everything is there in front of them—joy, sorrow, fear, love—but slightly muted, as if they’re spectators instead of participants. And maybe that’s why they always seem so effortlessly happy. They’ve never had to feel the sharpness of life.

We talk about pain like it’s this enemy we need to defeat. But what if pain isn’t the antagonist? What if it’s more like gravity—a force that grounds us, gives us weight, keeps us from floating away into something directionless and hollow? Pain makes joy recognizable. Without it, joy becomes just another passing moment—pleasant but forgettable.

I think of my own pain, the times it has settled into me like an iron weight. The nights when it felt like my chest was a room with no doors or windows. The moments when I wondered how other people walked around so easily while I felt like I was made of broken glass. But then, afterward—long after—I realized that pain hadn’t just wounded me. It had expanded me. Like scar tissue that’s thicker than the original skin. And when happiness finally returned, it didn’t just arrive; it flooded in, sharp and vivid, as though it was reclaiming space it had once abandoned.

That’s the thing people who haven’t really suffered don’t understand. Pain doesn’t just carve you up for fun—it carves you out so you can hold more. More sorrow, yes, but also more beauty. More nuance. More of that unnameable thing that makes you look at the sky on an ordinary Tuesday and feel something stir in your chest that words can’t quite capture.

But if you dodge pain for long enough, if you build your life like a fortress to keep it out, you don’t just avoid suffering. You avoid the transformation that suffering brings. You stay soft, untouched, unmarked—but also unformed. Like a tree growing in a greenhouse, shielded from every storm. Straight, symmetrical, and utterly ordinary. It’s the trees that grow in the open, that bend and twist and break in the wind, that develop the most character. You can trace the story of their survival in their knots and scars.

And people are the same. The ones who’ve been broken and rebuilt carry something in their eyes—a kind of gravity that no amount of curated happiness can replicate. You feel it when you talk to them: the quiet knowledge of what it means to lose, and by extension, to cherish. Pain humbles you, but it also grants you a sharper lens. It makes you look at someone else’s suffering and think, I know that terrain. I’ve walked it, too.

That’s what this person is missing. Not just the pain itself, but the depth it leaves behind. The capacity to feel something beyond the edges of their own comfortable life. To look at another human being and, instead of offering some well-meaning platitude, simply sit in the silence with them and know, with their whole being, what that silence means.

I used to envy people who hadn’t suffered. Now I wonder what it’s like to live without those emotional fingerprints etched into you. To walk through life without ever having been truly unmade and, consequently, remade.

I don’t pity them. But there is a sadness there. Not for what they’ve escaped, but for what they’ve never had the chance to become. Pain, after all, doesn’t just hurt. It reveals. It strips away the surface, leaves you raw, and then, if you’re lucky, shows you a self you didn’t know existed—one with roots deeper than you realized, and a heart capable of holding more than you ever thought it could.

And maybe that’s the real loss: not the pain itself, but the depth of life you miss when you spend all your energy avoiding it.