don't waste your pain

The nature of life is brutality and beauty pushing against each other like a sumo wrestling match.

This past weekend in my business, I had some shit hit the skids in the way that was both frustrating and embarrassing. I take a lot of pride in what I do, I care about every detail. so when things fall apart, I feel like I am falling apart too.

Part of my work is trying to make people happy. As a comic, as an air bnb host, its a game of making other people’s brains feel good in exchange for laughs or money or 5 stars reviews. Its very subjective. Sometimes in that process, things just go bad. Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes people just simply don’t like you.

When things go poorly, shit even when they don’t go perfect, we experience pain signals. Pain is a communication from your body, your mind, the world, that something significant is happening.

The interesting thing is that the significance is open to interpretation. Like a sad opera sang in a foreign language. We get some of the theme, but we never really know what it means.

After living through a lot of shit lately, one of the things I’m reminded of is to not waste your pain.

Don’t let the hurt go by without letting it help. Not everything can be reframed, and I despise when people tell me to look on the bright side. But, just like recycling, most things can be reconstituted, reused, repurposed.

So air bnb guest who tore me a new one about the house not being clean, I can use this. Relationships that go weird, I can use this. Reactions I did or didn’t get, I can use this.

The amateur artist needs these types of reactions to motivate themselves to do anything. That is not what I am prescribing. But a pro-chef knows that even bones have a value. Marrow, stocks, the most useless by-products of our hurt can serve our future.

I have never liked Cold Play. Not when they were hot, and not really now that everyone likes to use them as an example of generic white taste. But that song Lights has a line that I think about regularly.

“tears stream/ down your face/ I promise you I’ll learn from my mistakes”

That to me is the exact formula I am speaking on.

____+_____= I promise you I’ll learn from my mistakes

When I think about women I have loved, when I think about young Joseph writing songs but never getting what he wanted, when I think about circumstances that seemed so promising that disintegrated, and the even the thought of them is a pain signal to never try again, I think to myself that line. I PROMISE. I promise I will learn. I will do better, I will not waste your pain, I will not waste my own.

Don’t tell anyone I quoted Cold Play in my blog or they won’t book me on their dumpster show thx