Since the start of the pandemic, I feel like I have had varying degrees of the same conversation with people:
Me: How are you?
Person: I’ve been on Zoom calls for 9 hours straight for the past three days, I’m trying to learn Algebra to help my kid with her homework, and I just cancelled all of my long-standing traditions for Christmas.
But it’s fine. It’s fine. Others have it worse.
These are the conversations we are having with one another on an almost daily basis. And there is a name for this phenomenon.
Comparative suffering.
This. This is what so many of us do, and are doing even more often than ever before, during this pandemic.
Comparative suffering happens when individuals try to make sense of their own pain by comparing it to other people’s pain. And I get it. I can remember having a conversation with the priest in college who later became my mentor. We were sitting in the cafeteria at Gannon University and I had opened up to him about all of the struggles I was feeling.
“But I have it so good,” I said to him, looking down at my plate and shoving pieces of lettuce from side to side. “I shouldn’t complain.”
I was 19 years old and mired in the struggles that many teenagers feel. But I’ll never forget his response to me.
“You do have it good, in many ways,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that things feel easy for you. You are the only one living your life. And it’s ok if things feel hard for you.”
The benefit of comparative suffering is that this type of inventory helps us to establish perspective. Even at a young age, I could understand, even if I couldn’t name, my privilege. But I also felt like I wasn’t entitled to feel pain. Why should I be hurting when I was so fortunate?
The danger of comparative suffering is that it minimizes the legitimacy of our own feelings.
We are all weary. We are all bone-tired. And we also owe it to ourselves and to those in our lives to name the stresses that we feel, not only the stresses that we determine that we are entitled to feel. Because downplaying our own stress only leads to resentment and shame. And there is already too much resentment and shame in this world.
The best way to have a reservoir of compassion for others is to acknowledge and attend to our own feelings and most importantly, to stop ranking suffering.
If there is one thing that I have learned in recent months of hosting workshops at the gym, it is that we all feel suffering in our own unique ways, and we all feel guilty for struggling. So we pile shame on top of shame on top of guilt on top of struggle because we determine what should and should not feel stressful. For us. Not for others. We have compassion for others who are struggling. And we hold out on that same compassion for ourselves because “it shouldn’t hurt that much and it shouldn’t feel that bad and I should just buck up.”
What if we could keep our struggles in perspective but also allow ourselves to feel those struggles and express them?
And so I will say again - the best way to have a reservoir of compassion for others is to acknowledge and attend to our own feelings.
Have perspective, yes. But also have empathy for yourself.