So What If It Hurts: Pain as Proof I'm Still Alive

So what?

So what if it hurts?

I wrote those words in a notebook one evening in March, and I remember the feeling more than the handwriting. It was not courage. It was more like a door I had been holding shut for a long time, and I finally let go of the handle.

Pain, I had decided, was proof. Proof that something in me was still alive. A stone does not hurt. A woman who has stopped feeling anything does not hurt. So if it hurt, I was still here.

For a long time before that evening, I lived inside one small word: maybe. Maybe tomorrow it will be easier. Maybe next week I will wake up and the heaviness will be gone. Maybe if I wait quietly enough, life will come back and find me.

I spent whole weekends inside that word. It looks like hope, but it isn't. Hope moves you forward. Maybe keeps you sitting in the same chair, looking at the same door.

The night I wrote “so what,” I stopped waiting for the pain to leave before I started living. I let it come with me instead.

What saved me was what has always saved me: work. My hands busy, my mind full. Only the work is different now. Now it is this place, these stories, these quiet pages I build in the evenings after my day job ends. During the day there is simply no room for tears.

But I will not pretend they are gone. They still come at night, in that last soft minute before sleep, when the house is quiet and there is nothing left to do. I have stopped fighting them. They visit, they stay a little, and then I sleep.

I am not the woman I was before. Some parts of her I lost on the way, and I don't think they are coming back. But I can say something now that I could not say in March.

I survived.

Not beautifully. Not completely. But I am here, and I am building something that is mine. If a smaller version of me is the one who made it through, then that is the version I will take care of.

So what if it still hurts sometimes at night? It means I am still alive. And in the morning, there is work to do.

What is the thing that keeps you standing during the day, even when the nights are still hard?

Would you like to share your answer?

I read every answer myself. It stays private unless you say otherwise.

If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to local emergency services or a crisis line in your country right now. You deserve immediate support.

With love, from HerWay

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