No matter who you are, there are experiences and emotions that can fuck you up a bit—enough that you don’t want to think of them, enough that they’re marked as off-limits in your consciousness. They’re humiliating, intensely tragic, too much to take. They are not part of the self-image you’d like to have, the unblemished, heroic version of you that... See more

It’s important to remember that suffering is relative. Nothing determines what real suffering is except your mind; there is no other test. Sometimes you might feel as if you don’t have a right to call your suffering “suffering”, because you’re not a former child soldier, and you aren’t in extreme poverty. That’s not how it works. Relatively privile... See more

Nothing determines what real suffering is except your mind; there is no other test.

Interestingly, the experiences that persist in this way are not necessarily the most superficially severe. The experiences that persist are just the ones that weren’t fully processed at the time, the experiences you didn’t have the time, space, or tools to get over contemporaneously.