Someone sent me yet another dreadful piece of self-help prose.
I read it and wasn’t surprised by the same tired catechism: cut ties, stay off social media, repeat a few motivational lines in the mirror like a mantra.
I replied with something I’d written days earlier, and the reaction was just as predictable: Your words still sound haunted by a pain you haven’t let go of.
And that’s the damned problem. Everything gets dumbed down, as if no other reading were possible.
In this habit of shrinking what is closer to philosophical reflection into mere poetic confession, the essential gets lost: not every pain is a bleeding wound.
Self-help is obsessed with taming suffering, squeezing it into neat boxes of overcoming. It sells us the illusion that everything comes in stages, processes, closure. As if pain were a bank transaction: five steps, three catchphrases, two new friends — and you’re done. That urge to push us toward the light is its own kind of tyranny.
Because there are pains that never go away. They simply remain, lodged deep in existence. And that — I’ll insist until I’m out of breath — is not a flaw in the system.
The gurus of self-help keep repeating you deserve something better or remember you’re more than a breakup. Empty phrases that sound pleasant precisely because they trouble almost no one.
Wouldn’t it be healthier to admit that there isn’t always something better? Sometimes there is nothing at all. And still, you keep walking among the stones.
Life should never be a race to heal wounds, but to recognize our shadows — because living does not require meaning. It only requires living.
Who ever said denying pain makes you stronger?
Pain is not an anomaly to be corrected. It is a condition. Accepting it, without chasing redemption, is perhaps the only way to be honest with yourself.
The unbearable is not always overcome. Isn’t it better to dwell there and carry the weight of what never asks to be relieved?
To steep yourself in bitterness and live with it is not failure, no matter what the apostles of self-help keep preaching.
It is to exist without crown, without throne, without kingdom. A slave to the elements, with pain as destiny. And that is enough.
This piece was originally published in Spanish. You can read the original version here.