This Is How Pain Changes People

There is no love without pain and there is no life without pain. Pain is how we gain our wisdom and our strength and it’s how we develop thick skin. But in between pain and wisdom, we change — because no one gets out of pain the same person they used to be.

We still love. But with our guards up high, not as reachable as we used to be, not as trusting, not as innocent, not as pure and not the hopeless romantics we once were. We’re cautious, we’re afraid, we don’t want to get rejected, we don’t want to be bitter and we don’t want to repeat the same mistakes again. We break hearts to save our own and we can live years without telling someone how we feel because we know they don’t feel the same way.

We love, but we don’t love wholeheartedly anymore, we love in pieces, we love when we’re certain about someone’s feeling and we love when the timing is on our side, we love only when it’s safe. 

We still hope. But we also fear; we think of how things can go wrong, how good things will be short-lived, how things will not go the way we want them to because that’s easier to handle, it’s easier to deal with bad outcomes when you expected them. We live, but we don’t completely give in to happiness, we don’t believe that good things will last, we think that life will somehow take it all back.

We don’t give life a change to surprise us because we don’t want to be disappointed again so we disappoint ourselves. We try to predict that life will let us down so when it does, we won’t be broken.

We still dream. But we don’t dream too big and we don’t try to chase our dreams because we don’t want to lose again, we don’t want to fail, we don’t want to feel like we’re worthless. We want to prove that we’re good enough, that we’re capable of depending on ourselves, that we’re responsible adults, so we dream within reach, we dream about what we know we can attain, we don’t look up, we don’t look too far away and we don’t believe in miracles. We dream, but we don’t follow our dreams, we don’t think they’ll happen to us, we don’t think we deserve that kind of happiness because we’re used to pain.

We stopped believing in miracles ever since our dreams became nightmares. 

Pain changes people; mostly for the better, but when people suffer, they try to do everything they can to avoid it, they don’t want their hearts to sink into the ground again, they don’t want to cry uncontrollably again and they don’t want to feel weak again.

But when we try to avoid pain, we sometimes avoid pleasure. When we try to avoid pain, we avoid taking risks that could change our lives, when we try to avoid pain, we avoid loving and being loved in return.

Sometimes I wish pain didn’t change us, I wish pain didn’t get so deeply to us so we can love, live, hope and dream like we used to. So we can believe in happiness and miracles the way we used to.

Sometimes I wish we could change pain instead of pain changing us, so we can find a way to be ourselves again, to be the people we used to be before we were broken.