You Are Not Your Pain
A few days before I legally changed my name, I lay in bed with David Bowie playing softly in the background and the weight of the world on my shoulders. I was sitting there alternating between typing an article for Medium and working on the fourth draft of a fiction novel I’ve poured my soul into. The idea of a sleep schedule being entirely foreign to me after becoming so acclimated to home and work mixing together over the course of the past year, I typed and typed until my fingers became tired enough to take a break. I glanced over at my dog sleeping as well as I wish I could and I opened the app that sucks away hours of my life in the middle of most nights: TikTok. On the rare occasion, I come across a video that stimulates my mind rather than simply serving as a distraction from the noise of my thoughts. This was one of those nights.
I’ve always held my head high, appearing immune from the words and actions of those who’ve hurt me. And it’s easy for people to think that I’m a cold-hearted, emotionally-detached individual lacking a soul. I process trauma and emotion and experience differently than those around me. Over the course of my life, I’ve developed defense mechanisms that tell me that expressing emotion and speaking about trauma are weaknesses. In a way, they are. Expressing pain and feeling makes you vulnerable. You remove that armor just enough to release a little bit of pressure, but in doing so you run the risk of exposing yourself too much and getting hurt again. People have always attempted to lecture me on why I shouldn’t hold onto grudges, why we shouldn’t hate other people, and how forgiveness is an important part of healing. I always struggled with all of it, but I couldn’t put it into words until I found this TikTok.
One of my favorite creators, Joanne Molinaro, Esq. — more commonly known as The Korean Vegan on social media — has a way of drawing you in and making you feel heard, justifying your feelings, and helping you cope with your past in ways that most of society doesn’t teach. This video was particularly profound. At the start of the video, Molinaro says, “When you get hurt, they say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Don’t listen to that shit. Sometimes the things that don’t kill you can actually make you weaker. Some hurts are so big you’d rather hide in a hole forever than ever get hurt again like that.” As toxic and nearly nonexistent as the relationship with my birth family was, the trauma wasn’t just erased because I made the decision to put myself first. Experiencing an emotionally-lacking childhood with prejudiced parents doesn’t suddenly go away. And while I’m relieved that there was no legitimate relationship to begin with because it made it easier to make this huge decision, it doesn’t mean that I don’t question what it would’ve been like to grow up with normal, compassionate human beings.
In the months after I came out, my birth family made multiple attempts to manipulate me into speaking to them. They tried to get me evicted from my apartment, they had my stroke-victim grandmother struggle to handwrite a short letter, and they sent every vague threat in the book in twisted efforts to coerce me into communication. Many of the people I spoke with about these incidents suggested that I should work to let go of the anger, let go of the pain, and forgive them so that I can move forward without any residual bitterness. This is where the next part of Molinaro’s video really hit me. “Now, I’m not saying you have to forgive the ones who hurt you. No, fuck them. They don’t deserve your forgiveness. But you know who does? The person who once loved them, the person who let them past the guardrails in the first place: you.” We’re taught that moving forward past trauma and pain cannot be fully successful until we forgive the ones who hurt us, but that’s not really true. We raise our children and advise our friends on the premise that people mean well, that people don’t intend to be harmful. But that’s not always the reality, is it? How much trauma and pain and toxicity are we really expected to accept until enough is enough? And why on Earth would we forgive the ones who caused this much internal strife? The short answer: we shouldn’t. As Molinaro eloquently explains, we owe nothing — no forgiveness, no apologies, no sympathy — to those who hurt us. The only person we owe forgiveness to is ourselves.
Forgiving myself is a concept that I didn’t quite understand at first. Other people were the ones that hurt me, so what did I do that warrants forgiveness? The more I reflected, the more I recognized that I held it against myself for letting anyone get close enough to hurt me in the way that few people ever have. I let them past the guardrails, and I do have to forgive myself for that. This is where the final part of the video comes into play: “Here’s the thing: You have a choice. You can let those betrayals cling to you, weigh you down, or you can peel them off. Because you are not their failures. You are not your heartbreak. And you are not defined by your pain. Even though your pain makes you weak, it’s your choices that make you strong.” The thing I’ve noticed most in myself and many other LGBTQ people is a level of guilt that won’t seem to dissipate. Guilt for letting someone close enough to hurt us, guilt for doing what’s best for ourselves and leaving abusers behind, guilt for ignoring the input of others to listen to our heads and hearts for the first time. The guilt is something I thought I wouldn’t be able to shake. I’m constantly reflecting and rejecting any internalized homophobia that lies within, I’ve accepted that I’m a result of my experiences and how I’ve handled them, and I’ve put myself first. But the guilt adheres to your soul and refuses to let you go. Or so I thought.
As this incredible influencer explains, we’re not defined by our pain. We are not our heartbreak. We’re not the failures of those who hurt us, and we can’t let them take anything else away from us. We have to release ourselves of the burden of our vulnerability. We were hurt, and we’re the ones who let them get past the guardrails to do it. Now we learn. Life is nothing but a incomprehensible series of choices. Every minute, every hour, every day, we’re making choices that shape our perspectives and our minds for the rest of our lives. We make the choice to break away from those causing us pain. We make the choice to prioritize ourselves and stop allowing everyone to chip away at us little by little. And we make the choice to free ourselves of the guilt of living for our happiness, our purpose, ourselves.
Life is far too short to live on other people’s terms — especially those who hurt us. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: the world is a dark, scary, often-shitty place. What makes it infinitely worse is the feeling that you’re not living for yourself. We’re taught that your blood family is everything, that you need to give people chance after chance to redeem themselves after they’ve wronged you. But these are the rules of life written by those versed in inflicting trauma on those too naïve to put an end to it. It’s not easy, it’s not simple, and it’s not fair, but we owe it to ourselves to make the choice to walk away — to make the choice to fight for ourselves and find our way in life unrestrained by our pain, uninhibited by those who’ve hurt us.
If you’d like to follow the extraordinary Joanne Molinaro, Esq. (The Korean Vegan), you can find her here:
Joanne Molinaro, Esq. [TikTok @thekoreanvegan | Twitter: @thekoreanvegan | Instagram: @the.korean.vegan | Website: thekoreanvegan.com
