Woman is a Pain

keep bleeding, but love

I had a terrible broken heart when I was twenty-two years old, and I wanted to wear a T-shirt announcing it to everyone. Instead, I got so drunk I fell in the middle of Sixth Avenue and scraped all the skin off my knee. Then you could see it, no T-shirt necessary—see something, that bloody bulb under torn jeans, though you couldn't have known what it meant.

— Leslie Jamison, Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.

— Jenny Holzer

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It’s nearly the end of December, although it feels like it’s been December for years.¹ Tonight, the snow is falling fast and hard outside my window and my dog is asleep at my feet. This year has been difficult, this December feels like the end of something important. In a journal entry from last December, I wrote, I’m so in love my head feels like it’s spinning. I’m so in love, I’m drowning in it. This December, things have changed. I think I did drown in it. I’m left trying to make sense of what happened, who I was then, and who I am now. I’m trying to understand the ways in which I’ve changed, hopefully for the better. This is the story I tell myself about how we came together and why we fell apart. This is the story I tell myself about being wounded in the name of love and about the bravery it takes to continue loving in the face of it all.

This December, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t pin down love. I can’t dissect it until it makes sense to me. Love is not so much an intellectual experience as it is a sensuous one, in fact, it may be the least intellectual endeavor that one can pursue. In her essay, “Against Narrative,” Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote that, “if love has taught us anything, it’s that there are things known to the body that cannot be grasped by the mind. The things I’ve felt, I realize, don’t belong to my rational self any more than anything else does.” Love, as I’ve come to know it, is the action of opening up. Love, like pain, resides in our bodies perhaps even more so than our minds. This December, I have resigned myself to truth telling. The truth being that I am heartbroken, and frankly, terrified to admit it. Heartbreak—the most universal pain—and yet I am afraid of speaking about it out loud, afraid of being too honest about my woundedness. But what I have come to know is this: love, like pain, demands to be felt.²

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I was twenty when I experienced my first true heartbreak. Standing in the airport in Brisbane—about to board a flight back home to Canada—looking a man in the eyes and knowing I’d never see him again. I hardly know how to write about what came next. I was a type of wounded that I hadn’t previously known existed. This sadness was profound, it deepened my connection to the world. I understood why my mother, at the time ten years divorced, seemed to perform her womanhood instead of embodying it. No longer tethered to the realm of my childhood, instead, she was a walking wound. It used to disgust me, her behavior, as if her pain was an admission of my pain—my secret, private pain that was more important than anyone else’s. I was terrified of being labeled as wounded.

Leslie Jamison writes in her essay, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” of wounded women, notes that we are everywhere. She insists that women’s wounds remain pressing news. Despite the potential fetishization, she implores us to speak about our pain and to interrogate the parts of ourselves which are wounded. This work is important, Jamison says, because it allows us to open our hearts to more life and more love. Jamison writes:

While wounds open to the surface, damage happens to the infrastructure - often invisibly, irreversibly—and damage also carries the implication of lowered value. Wound implies en media res: The cause of injury is in the past but the healing isn't done; we are seeing this situation in the present tense of its immediate aftermath. Wounds suggest sex and aperture: A wound marks the threshold between interior and exterior; it marks where a body has been penetrated. Wounds suggest that the skin has been opened—that privacy is violated in the making of the wound, a rift in the skin, and by the act of peering into it.

To Jamison, wounds are an opening; of our skin, our hearts, our potential for care and healing. But at twenty-one, I didn’t want my skin to be peered into; I didn’t want to betray my body as penetrable. All of these wounded women, surely I was not the same! Surely, I was better. But then this wound, this heartbreak, was beginning to humiliate me; to make me the same as my mother. I was determined to move past it, I was twenty-one and already tired of this narrative. I wouldn’t be wounded in this way, I would be wounded in far more interesting ways, ways that didn’t involve men, or sex, or rape, or my body, or my shame. Jamison calls this the “post-wounded,” writing that, “the post-wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-pity.” I spent nearly my entire twenties inhabiting this space, my wounds ironic and facetious. I stopped cutting myself, not because the desire disappeared, but because it was embarrassing to bleed. I wanted to be able to float high above it all, to offer my friends sage advice as someone who was unaffected by matters of the heart. My post-woundedness would be aspirational, I would be the cool girl.

For the majority of my twenties, I stopped writing. I was waiting for something to happen to me that was interesting enough to write about. Though unclear to me at the time, there was something obviously misogynistic about my attitude towards other women and their pain.³ I wanted to be markedly different, better. I wanted my writing to be impenetrable, plain only to others who had suffered uniquely. Heartbreak was too mundane, drug addiction too trite, my sadness about my father unoriginal. Though of course, I was always waiting for someone to ask me about my wounds. I’d hoped that something would give it away, that I would appear to someone as especially in pain, and that they would free me from this cage of cool girl. Jamison writes of this same double-bind, noting, “I think of the bulb of my skinned knee, badge of my heartbreak, and how I loved the clarity of what it spoke but felt utterly pained by how much I loved it. I am not a melodramatic person. I've never wanted to be one.” Maybe here is where I admit to you all, I am in fact, a melodramatic person. Not so much a cool girl, but a real girl.

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I fell in love again when I was twenty-seven. Hard and fast, like the movies. I knew I loved D from the moment I saw them. I felt drawn to them in a way I have never felt before, in a way that left me vulnerable to love songs and rom-coms and to the idea of The One. I dreamt about them each night, I tried to work up the courage to confess my feelings. For months, I prayed they would love me back, and by some grace of God, they did. With D, I felt known, seen, freed from the terminal loneliness that marked my early twenties. They were whip-smart, they could handle my mood swings and my big ideas, and they made me feel more like myself than I ever have before. D had an incredible talent of perceiving exactly what I needed before I even knew it and in doing so, D opened doors for me that I didn’t realize I had closed. D allowed me to feel real, something I will be eternally grateful for.

We spent countless hours driving around the city telling each other stories, the story of our lives, the story of how things used to be and how things would become, the story of our pain, our secrets, our hopes and our dreams, the stories we couldn’t tell anyone else. The car, a very literal vehicle for our aspirations, a place in which I could be honest. In D, I found a refuge for the stories I’d been telling myself since I was a kid. I found a place in which I could admit what I’d been withholding from myself for so long—I am just as wounded as everyone else. I’d like to think they felt this way too, that with one another we could be honest about the stories we told ourselves. What I was able to say to D in private allowed me to live out these stories in my real life. I went back to school, I started writing again.

My relationship with D was perhaps my most serious attempt at living authentically and my most passionate experiment in living well. But being in love, it turns out, is not for the faint of heart. My wounds were opened up again and suddenly they were right there at the surface, demanding to be felt. No longer could I pretend I was post-wounded. In opening myself to love, I had to reckon with the relationship between love and pain. To love someone requires an immense honesty, a sort of flaying of oneself, a presenting of your wounds in the face of someone else’s wounds. I think what D saw in me—what made our relationship so terrifying—was the precise location of all my wounds. There was no sense in pretending I was post-wounded, they were like a bloodhound. They sensed it on me immediately. D didn’t want cool girl, post-wounded. D wanted real girl, they wanted me—wounds and all.

During the darkest parts of our relationship, I often wondered, do you have to be healed in order to love someone else properly? Were we destined to fail one another on the basis that we were both too wounded? Sometimes, when we would argue, I felt as though we stopped being human and existed only as two planets of pain and suffering. I wish I could go back to these moments, if only to remind myself that wounds require care. How many times did I bark and bite when I should have comforted, nurtured? How often did I lead with anger, with my woundedness, when I could have asked for reassurance?

For both D and I, love has not come easy. Try as we might, love (to me) often felt like a trap, a promise the same as a threat. This newfound softness inspired in me by D revealed my post-woundedness, and instead, demanded of me I pay attention to the wound. At times, I felt that to be in love was an affront to my integrity. I was not going to become this kind of woman. In our last car conversation, I shouted at D angrily, I am not going to become my mother. As if becoming my mother was the worst fate that could befall me, as if wearing the wounds of being loved was a worse fate than death.

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When D and I broke up, almost a year ago now, I tried to convince myself that our wounds had nothing to do with it. But far be it for me to pretend that I had learned how to insulate myself from woundedness. I spent months telling myself all the reasons it wouldn’t have worked anyway, as if logic could eclipse sadness. I spun story after story in an attempt to shield myself from my pain. Joan Didion wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but I think storytelling in the place of feeling doesn’t accomplish what we hope it will, it doesn’t make life after loss any easier. What matters in the aftermath of pain is not the narrative but the reckoning—the choice to acknowledge the wound honestly and tend to it with care. Fisher-Quann writes that, “this is the paradox of narrative: it is both existentially necessary and necessarily insufficient. We can’t escape the story…but the story is also never enough.”

What I mean to say is this: the stories I told myself didn’t heal the wound, didn’t delay or postpone the wound, didn’t pack the wound till it stopped bleeding. I am here now, clutching onto these stories because they are all I have left of my relationship with D. In beginning to write this essay, I found myself in somewhat of a moral quandary. Is it interesting or fruitful to write about my heartbreak? I’ve long been stuck in this loop, how do I stop writing about my pain? How do I stop glorifying the pain passed down to me by the women in the family? Can I stitch up this wound, when the wound itself is the source of creation? Is there authenticity in declaring publicly that I am in pain? Jamison writes,

What's fertile in a wound? Why dwell in one? Wounds promise authenticity and profundity, beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by. They yield scars full of stories and slights that become rallying cries. They break upon the fuming fruits of damaged engines and dust these engines with color. And yet - beyond and beneath their fruits - they still hurt.

What Jamison offers us here is the permission to be a wounded woman. She offers a framework in which to understand wounds not as ugly or shameful, but as the site of reclamation. A wound is fertile because it represents a possibility for new growth; the scab healing over, the attempt to love again after heartbreak. Importantly though, as Jamison notes, for all their fruitfulness—wounds still hurt. I think of my mother, remarried now for ten years, and her bravery. I wonder about her wounds and how she healed them. I think the answer lies in her willingness to be hurt again in the name of love.

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Ultimately, what I believe to have caused the demise of my relationship with D was not the wounds themselves, but the shame surrounding them. Unable to understand my pain as a place of potential fertility, I turned away from healing. I felt it was impossible to overcome the hurt. To take Jamison’s theory of permission even further, I want to say that we need not only to allow ourselves to be wounded, but to wear our wounds with pride. A wounded woman is a woman who has experienced the world around her, a wounded woman is a woman who has been brave. There is no place for shame in healing. I want to push back against the idea that the wounded woman is overdone, that everyone is tired of writing about her and in turn, reading about her. Jamison writes:

You court a certain disdain by choosing to write about hurting women…You want to cry, I am not a melodramatic person! But everyone thinks you are. You're willing to bleed but it looks, instead, like you're trying to get bloody. When you bleed like that - all over everything, tempting the sharks - you get told you're corroborating the wrong mythology. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I wonder, what is so wrong about trying to get bloody? Maybe if I would have gotten bloodier, learned to better handle the mess, I wouldn’t be so unhealed.

I think that the only way out of this hurt is through the wound. Maybe the wound is the final frontier, we must feel our sadness in order to heal from it. Could it be that there is no teleological explanation of our pain? And that intellectualizing it won’t stop the hurting any sooner? Some time after my relationship with D ended, I made the decision to lean into the pain. It didn’t work—not right away—because of the years I spent post-wounded. It took time for my mind to accept that the stories I told myself were meaningless, that the wound didn’t care why it was there, nor was it going away through simple logic. I took up crying instead, crying at the rock-climbing gym, crying at the beach, crying at the grocery store, and most often, crying in the car. I felt soothed by the notion that everyone I know has been wounded in this way. There’s actually nothing special at all about heartbreak; it may be the most regular kind of pain. There’s something extremely comforting in knowing that this wound is the hallmark of being human, that this pain actually gives way to a deeper connection with others rather than alienates you.

All of this to say, we must write about our wounds. Not because they are inherently bad, or uniquely painful, or the most interesting thing about being alive, but because we must be unashamed of our pain. I am writing this to convince myself that love is a project worthwhile of pursuit, that the wounds garnered in the attempts at love deserve to be worn proudly. Jamison writes that, “the pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but love.” Our bleeding wounds become an opening to connection, a place in which we can care for one another. Our wounds bind us together, you and I—we bleed the same way.

For now, I am moving beyond post-woundedness, I am moving towards something likely messier and more fraught, but perhaps also more rewarding, more fruitful. Something with more forgiveness and less contempt. A place less serious, more joyful. To move past post-woundedness requires a caretaking of the wounds that lead me here in the first place. It seems I must learn gentleness, seek out care. I don’t know if I have gotten any of this right; I don’t know if the stories I tell myself will resonate with anyone else. I don’t know if D will read this and feel it rings true. But what I can say with certainty is that throughout our relationship, we were brave. We chose to love one another despite the difficulty, despite our wounds. We chose love in the face of shame, loneliness, and isolation. Fisher-Quann writes that,

The rewards of feeling, it turns out, are the same as the punishments: we are forced to experience immediately what we have. This is a dangerous project — one that imbues the world with a violence and a volume that extend indiscriminately in all moral directions — but one that nonetheless also allows us to live. It is worth it, I think, to approach the unbearable. It is worth it to endure it all.

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There is a memory I have of my mother immediately following her divorce with my father. She had lost an alarming amount of weight and dyed her hair a bright, bleach blonde. She took up salsa dancing and wearing low cut, tight shirts. I was watching her walk out the door to go dance at a local Mexican restaurant and I remember feeling ashamed at her glaring woundedness. I was fourteen and I felt an immense pressure to stop her, to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to pull herself together. Her eyeliner and her kitten heels, it was simply too much for me. Looking back at this memory now, I can only aspire to wear my wounds as obviously as she did. To go out and dance, pain in tow. I wish I could go back in time and tell her I’m proud of her, how brave she was to ask the universe for more chances at love even though it hurts so fucking bad. As I grow older, I hope to be more like her. Less shame, more bravery, more love.

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A note to say: thank you all for reading and supporting my writing this past year. I remain eternally humbled and extremely grateful for those of you that read my work. Writing and publishing in this way feels mostly embarrassing and slightly weird but I appreciate the opportunity to share my secrets with you all. I wish you all a wonderful end to the year and a blessed beginning to 2025. Love you <3

1. This essay is heavily inspired by Rayne Fisher-Quann’s piece, Against Narrative, which is available on her substack— I highly recommend you check it out.

2. I recognize that this quote is essentially the same as the John Green quote from The Fault in Our Stars and I won’t be made to feel ashamed about it.

3. Unfortunately, this is because I read a lot of (and based most of my personality on) Charles Bukowski.