No Pain, No gain.
Whenever I was in pain, someone around me would audaciously offer what they thought were magic words.
“No pain, no gain.”
Even a therapist in one of her more daring yet completely ineffective session uttered the same thing.
Whoever came up with the dogma that is "no pain no gain" is probably sitting comfortably at the top of some capitalistic pyramid.
Funny part is most of their gain is actually generated from someone else's pain.
Pain.
Everything is about pain.
The tiger balm smell that silently lingers in your joints these days, following you everywhere you go,
that's pain.
The late night pizza that you devoured all by yourself, somewhere between hunger and your fifth meltdown of the weekend,
that's pain.
The 10k marathon you ran last week convincing yourself it might outrun your anxiety,
that's pain.
The last minute tickets you bought for that island trip that you thought would fix all your relationship problems,
that's just pain, smiling at you from the near future.
Pain wrote itself into my life in the form of this metal appliance 12 years ago.
Until then, it only visited under the disguise of loneliness and despair.
On 12th March, 2014, it decided to take a physical shape.
Yeah, yeah, on the surface, it may look like a butterfly forcing its way out of a cocoon, as if something delicate and poetic was emerged out of all that pain.
But I swear, there was nothing gentle about its rent free tenancy over a decade.
Every word had to claw its way out.
Dragging itself across metal, brushing past resistance, dispensing discomfort and of course, a lot of pain,
sometimes even obscure smell too.
Behind every chew, every bite, every brush, the pain sat there and pouting denying me the small ordinary pleasures most people get it as a free pass.
Sometimes, it refused my favourite dish,
Other times, it made sure a bite of one innocent thick yet delicious protein bar felt like a bad decision. One time, just to make a point it even snapped one of my braces which dispensed more and more pain as if it wanted to remind me who has the final say.
At some point, I figured I’d like to renegotiate the terms of this long standing subscription that had been exclusively billing me in pain. Doctors warned me, of course.
Said it’d only bring more pain as if that was a new information. As if pain and I weren’t already in a long term toxic relationship.
My adamant ass didn’t listen.
So, I let them break my bones and teeth, move it, strike it, stir it and finally fix it, like a professional construction project.
For the first time, Pain was not something that visited, but invited, with appointments and receipts, of course.
It couldn’t come and go as it owned the place, it had to definitely check in at the front desk this time only during the visitation hours.
So when they handed it back to me, piece by piece, I looked at it with strange sense of joy and jubilation, held onto it for a moment, smiled, and said.
“No pain, no gain, right?”
