as small as a world and as large as alone

6:54pm December 20, 2013

cfconfessions:

“It annoys me to no end when healthy people hurt themselves, go into hospital for short stints of 2 or 3 days and have the nerve to complain about having three needles in four days or something stupid like that. They need to grow up.”

-Anonymous

Pain is pain.

My hospital stays are longer and more frequent than the average healthy person’s hospital stays, and contain more pain and suffering.  (I have many chronic illnesses, but not cystic fibrosis.)

Your hospital stays are undoubtedly longer and more frequent than mine and contain more pain and suffering than mine.

If people can’t complain just because someone’s pain somewhere out there is worse than theirs, then none of us should complain until we’re dead.

That said, I do get annoyed by certain types of complaining.  The kind where people basically are not only wallowing, but seem to revel in the wallowing.  Like I understand being stuck in self-pity-land and not knowing an easy way out.  I’ve been there, and it’s hard to get out.  And I understand real depression too.  But there’s a very specific thing people do, that is very easily distinguishable from either depression or being unwillingly stuck in a cycle of self-pity.  Where people almost turn self-pity into a high art form, and not only wallow, but seem to love the fact that they are wallowing and turn it into a badge of pride, and try to make it seem beautiful somehow.  And that makes me angry because it can make more people get trapped in that state who don’t mean to be there in the first place.  Among other reasons.  I’ve watched it happen to vulnerable people who see others doing it, and it’s very ugly and it really pisses me off.

But that goes for both healthy and sick people and isn’t specific to how bad they have it.  And it’s not all complaining.  It’s not even all self-pity.  And… yeah.

Plus, needles are really hard for a lot of people, healthy or sick.  And while a few needle sticks seems like nothing to you or me, it can be a lot for someone who isn’t used to it and has a problem with needles.

I just can’t get into the “healthy people have nothing to complain about because I have it so much worse” thing.  As someone else put it, does that mean slightly happy people have nothing to be happy about because other people are so much happier?  It just.. doesn’t make sense to me.  By those standards, you shouldn’t complain about what happens to you because there are people who are in more pain than you are, live their entire lives in the hospital undergoing surgery after surgery after surgery, all of them incredibly painful, and will never be able to communicate their pain to anyone because they can’t speak or type or use any understandable system of communication.  There’s always someone who has it worse.

And I’m not even that big on complaining, I just don’t think this makes sense.

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