Several years ago, this post The Pain Olympics became a huge hit in infertility blogland, discussed, reposted, debated, so forth. It still pops up from time to time (as it did recently on my high-FSH bulletin board) and has gained a minor cult following–certainly the term “the pain olympics” is a neologism that has stuck, at least among infertiles. The gist of the argument is that each person’s pain is subjective, unique–to them, to their circumstances–and therefore can not/should not be judged objectively. That is, there is no comparing pain. It all sucks, and we can not begin to try to ascertain whether one person’s loss or grief or predicament is worse (or better) than anyone else’s.
Bunk, I say. Hooey. This perspective SOUNDS good, it SOUNDS like a reasonable path to tread, but in my opinion this is the easy way out. It reminds me of when I would ask my students to enter some debate, and they would attempt to opt out by using a sort of radical relativism: well, we’re all different, so who knows? /well, he’s entitled to his opinion/ his opinion is just that, an opinion/ his opinion is his own, etc., etc. Now, don’t get me wrong. I consider myself a radical, and I consider myself a relativist insofar as I deeply distrust absolutes . . . but this sort of solipsism drives me up the wall. I suspect that those who trot it out are simply unwilling to do the hard thinking it would take to come up with some viable answers to questions like, How do we categorize pain? How do we experience pain? What sort of pain is the worst sort? How does a person’s processing of pain either maximize or minimize their experience of it? People who work in certain fields–bioethics comes to mind–are forced to do this sort of hard analysis all the time. What are the rest of us scared of?
I think we’re scared of admitting that our pain might, just might, be less pain than someone else’s. My deep suspicion is that we all want to win The Pain Olympics because then we are entitled to the sympathy and coddling that attends The Victim. In gaining victim status, we gain self-entitlement. This is why so often when you are in the midst of experiencing some pain–a death in the family, for example, or an illness–you suddenly are confronted with any number of people who want to tell you their similar or not-so-similar stories. I know what you’re going through…last year, my Aunt Matilda died of lung cancer and….
Some stories might be welcome, especially those that closely reflect your own pain or come from people who really DO know what you’re going through because they’ve gone through it too. But what often happens is that people who really have no idea about the extent of your pain try to claim that they, in fact, do. They can’t stand to lose The Pain Olympics. I would rather NOT validate the person who absolutely needs to be related to me in pain by saying, yes, I can see how your nine months of infertility and my 12 years of it make us soul-sisters in pain. Although I agree that everyone has experienced some loss and thus felt some degree of pain in life, not everyone has experienced the same amount of pain, and I think that should be acknowledged. It should not be a problem for someone to admit, I can’t possibly know what you’re feeling, or, This situation is worse for you than for me, and I’m sorry. Perhaps each of us IS a unique individual, but that uniqueness is not an absolution.
When my friend T. lost her baby girl at the age of five days, I could not imagine the horror she was going through. Even though T. had no trouble getting pregnant, planned it down to the week she was going on sabbatical, and I had been struggling to get pregnant for 11 years at that point with no luck, I recognized beyond a shadow of a doubt that her devastation was so much worse than mine. Period. And even when I ended up miscarrying two subsequent pregnancies–at five and at nine weeks–I still knew that her loss was so much greater than mine. And even when T. ended up delivering a healthy baby boy last month, and I still have nothing to show for my attempts to conceive, I would still argue that her pain has been worse.
I also know that I cringe when my friend M. threatens to throw herself off a bridge if she isn’t pregnant by the time she is 30, after only nine months of trying to conceive. Her sense of what’s earth-shattering when it comes to infertility galls me to a certain extent. There have been times when I have wanted to scream at her, Talk to me when you’re 39 and have been at this for 12 years and have at least two miscarriages under your belt. Then you can rant and rave and rend your hair. Yeah. Of course, I am extremely supportive of her because that is what sane people do when they are in community with other people. We do not point out that perhaps your negative pregnancy test this month is not the same as my miscarriage this month, even though you are carrying on as if it is. We simply smile and nod and go home and write on our blogs.
For me, it’s NOT impossible to make distinctions between the degrees of pain that people have experienced. If someone actually wants to try to compare infertility to cancer (and this happens all the time), then I assume there’s just something Wrong. With. Them. There is no way infertility compares to a potentially life-threatening, terminal disease. Argue all you want with me that infertility is “the death of a dream” and that “an unfulfilled life isn’t any sort of life at all.” Bunk. You are in the midst of struggling with the expectations you had for your life, which are not coming true, at least not in way you thought–you expected–they would. But you are consumed by your sense of victimization if you can’t see clear to acknowledge that your problems conceiving a child are NOT akin to losing your life.
Many women on the bulletin board I participate in make the rather clunky point again and again that secondary infertility (when you already have one bio child and are trying for another) is EXACTLY THE SAME as primary infertility. I have to admit, this one drives me crazy. I wish they would just post on the secondary infertility board and leave the rest of us alone. Because it is NOT the same. There is just no way. I accept and believe that these women experience tremendous pain that they can not create a sibling for their child, but my God, they HAVE a child! Hello??? Why can’t they just say, this really hurts, but it is categorically different from the hurt of not having any child at all?
Many women on the bulletin board I participate in are unmarried, unpartnered women, who would love to be in a fulfilling relationship such as I have, and also have a child. They don’t have a child (like me), but they don’t have a husband/partner either (unlike me). Their pain might very well be much, much worse than mine, given that information.
The original blogger of The Pain Olympics makes the eloquent point that “it’s not about where you fall on the Bell Curve. It’s about getting off the Bell Curve.” I appreciate her perspective, and it does sound very understanding. But if you read other entries in her blog–the one where her best friend has to remind her that some people (namely the childless best friend) are envious of her one child, for instance–it’s clear that the blogger recognizes that her pain is not as bad as some other people’s pain. Okay. Good. So, again I ask, why do we have the need to level the playing field? What do we gain from “getting off the Bell Curve” and claiming that pain is All One?
I fear that our refusal to quantify our experiences with pain originates in a profound sense of disconnection from each other. That the only way we can relate is if we all come from the same place, if we’re all on the same footing, so we create a false sense that we’re all United-in-Our-Pain. But that’s not true. We experience different levels of pain based on different experiences of it. We should be able to commiserate with each other despite those differences. It demands complex thinking to figure this out, an allegiance to complexity. It is not as simple as insisting that it’s all the same. It just isn’t. And it just shouldn’t be. I have more respect for the people who have been dealt more pain in this life than I have than to try to equate our experiences. Instead, I want to listen to them, so that I can learn.
By the way, the link I posted above contains a quiz, with cumulative points, to try to “objectively” assess your degree of pain when it comes to infertility. It’s satire, of course, since she is trying to make the point that such an objective assessment is impossible. But lots of people took the quiz, nonetheless. I scored 6,150. I took silver.
(0)