Suffering & Madness: The beauty of pain

Did you ever feel like there’s a quiet kind of beauty in suffering? There definitely is. Suffering has its own haunting elegance, the way it weaves itself into the fabric of existence. I, all my life have been consumed by pain and grief. At first it hurts and then it turns into a shadow you learn to walk with. Madness, you see, isn’t as terrifying as it is often believed to be. When you have had enough with life and love and people, then comes the madness of being enticed to one’s own pain because that’s where one feels seen and heard and understood. Suffering isn’t something that’s merely endured- it is sculpted into something eternal.

Suffering & Art

Melancholy and Madness have long been the most trusted companion of a creative soul. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, Kafka- each of them danced on the periphery of pain. The amount of suffering one must endure to give birth to poetries and stories that transcend time is not for the ordinary. They did not merely suffer but made suffering their life and saw what cannot be seen through the eyes of an ordinary soul. Their pain did not only consume them but was spilled into ink, onto pages that still carry their ghosts. The art that goes beyond the limits of mere existence made them immortal- but at what cost? There is certainly not a clear answer to this. If their life wasn’t filled with melancholy, would there be existence of such profound creativity that made them worth remembering?

Madness

Madness strips away the veils of convention. Insanity doesn’t always mean that one goes out of control, but it does mean that the world that seems to be a perfect place is fractured, revealing truths too raw for the mind of an ordinary. There’s something wondrous yet tragic about the mind’s unravelling. The way it stripes illusion to the bone and bares the raw, beating heart of human experience. We fear it, there’s so much ache that we worry that it might break us- yet we are drawn to it. We are always curious about the way this madness makes them see the world. Captivated by the ones who live in the shadowed alleys of doom.

Suffering has its own artistry. The way it etches lines on face, settles into the depth of eyes, forces one to sit with the self, undistracted. It births poetry, music, art- a form of undisputed expression which might not have been existed untouched by suffering. Perhaps pain is the rawest muse, one can have. The muse that is universally embraced.

Is it worth?

But does art require tragedy? One needs to break to create something unbreakable? Perhaps not. But we can not deny the history, that the ones who gazed longest into the abys have created the most incandescent art. Perhaps who have not dived into the ocean cannot understand the dread of drowning or the beauty beneath the surface. The sacredness of turning pain into something meaningful is beyond the minds of mere onlookers.

Maybe the beauty of pain doesn’t lie in suffering itself, but in what we make of it. Each stroke is just a wound until we turn it into art. Therefore, in hope that we do not just succumb to life, we create something worthy out of it. Something that will outlive us. In the end, perhaps suffering’s only mercy is that it leaves us with stories worth telling.