Today, I am thinking about the inherent loneliness of pain.

Pain often drives us inward. People generally don't understand how to hold space for folks who are in pain. And if we don't know the source of that pain (or even if we do), it can feel like we are the only ones experiencing it. It's lonely.

If you throw in shame, the loneliness of pain feels magnified somehow. You're constrained by shame to keep your pain to yourself, to not burden anyone else with it. Some pain can't be cured, only managed, but people will still try to fix you when you try to feel less alone.

I am a cishet woman who often writes about motherhood and pregnancy. And no matter how often I hear women's stories, I am always tender to the ways new mothers are so lonely with pain. They tell me, like I told myself, "I thought I was the only one going through this."

This moment is a lonely void stretching indeterminately. I'm reminding myself to hold space for the multiple areas people are in pain right now, how that pain manifests or doesn't. Not not to fix the pain with a rhetorical band-aid, but sit with their loneliness.

I see ya'll.