The Burden of Honesty in Suffering

General 2 Minutes

There is a peculiar loneliness in suffering that cannot decide how visible it is allowed to become. A terrible arithmetic that governs and if you step wrong, there are serious consequences. Maybe not in the short run, but absolutely over time.

Speak too often of pain, exhaustion, grief, disability, illness, fear—and suddenly your humanity is reduced to the single note of your suffering. You become “negative.” Difficult. Too much. An attention seeker collecting sympathy like spare change. A burden people begin to carry resentfully, arms tiring beneath the invisible weight of your honesty. We’ve all seen faces change, excuses made, an awkward pause, and suddenly attention is focused elsewhere. Invitations dry up and texts stop.

But remain quiet, speak only in fragments, offer careful half-truths and polite smiles, and the world grows suspicious in a different direction. If you can laugh at dinner, if you can answer a text, if you can stand upright in public, perhaps nothing is truly wrong after all. Perhaps you have exaggerated the ache. Perhaps you are performing sickness rather than enduring it. Even the closest to us don’t get it.

And so you find yourself trapped between accusation, suspicion and a terrible dishonesty. There is no correct volume at which to narrate suffering and healthy people lose interest quickly.

The body may be screaming while you learn restraint, learn to calibrate how much you say. Many people who live with chronic illness, depression, disability, grief, or trauma become translators of their experiences, endlessly recalibrating how much truth others can tolerate. Too much honesty unsettles people. Too little honesty comforts them into disbelief. Society claims to admire vulnerability, but only in measured doses, preferably packaged with resilience, optimism, and a reassuring ending. Pain must arrive edited. Digestible. Inspirational.

Otherwise, people recoil.

There is an unspoken expectation that suffering should either be catastrophic enough to visibly destroy you or minor enough to overcome quietly. Except so much of human pain exists in the vast gap between those extremes. Invisible illnesses. Lingering grief. Fatigue heavy as wet wool. Minds that fracture privately while their owners continue buying groceries and answering emails. People expect suffering to look cinematic, but most pain is terribly mundane. It folds laundry. It attends appointments. It smiles when spoken to. It takes the children to school and supervises homework. It survives another ordinary Tuesday.

That mundanity makes people suspicious.

We are taught to associate authenticity with visibility. If someone is truly struggling, shouldn’t there be evidence? Tears. Weight loss. Isolation. Ruin. Yet those who live closest to suffering often become experts at concealment because survival itself requires performance. Bills must still be paid. Children still need to be taken to their activities. The world does not pause gently around pain. So people learn to camouflage devastation beneath routine.

And then they are punished for how well they adapted.

There is cruelty in requiring people to prove their suffering while simultaneously condemning them for speaking of it. It creates a terrible self-consciousness, a constant monitoring of one’s own expression. Am I talking about this too much? Am I minimizing it too much? Am I unbearable? Am I unbelievable?

Eventually, silence itself becomes exhausting.

Perhaps the real tragedy is not merely that suffering is misunderstood, but that people are forced to curate it at all—to package their hardest realities into forms others find acceptable. To constantly negotiate between being dismissed and being resented. To stand before the world holding the complicated truth: I am struggling, but I am still here. I am surviving, but survival is costing me; costing me more than I can explain in words.

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Published by Abigail Johnston

I'm a daughter, a wife, a mother, and I've been living with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer since March, 2017. All of the words I publish are my own.

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23 thoughts on “The Burden of Honesty in Suffering”

  3. Beautiful written, and it packs such a punch. The management of other people is a drain, and one does grow resentful of the need. You’ve expressed brilliantly the line forever being straddled.

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  4. Pingback: The Burden of Honesty in Suffering – From Famine to Feast

  5. A wise and touching piece Abigail. Yes, there is so much cruelty in making people prove their suffering, but then failing to simply listen and instead condemning them for speaking their truth. Ugh. It reminds me that people really do not make sense. It makes me want to give up on them. But, I’ll repeat what my mother used to say to me. She would quote Mother Teresa: “People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered; Forgive them anyway.” Thank you for sharing.

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  7. I had sciatica for a month or so. I was a nurse after thirty-seven years and had to retire on disability insurance since my husband had passed away and I could not lift anything over fifteen pounds. The hospital would not let me even volunteer at the hospital. So I went on disability insurance until I could find employment that would not make my back problems worse. I am ten years older now and still have some back issues but I have adapted my life to accomodate safety first for my back’s sake. I stood up for myself and over time things greatly improved.

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  8. the unexplainable anguish of suffering in front of others, when it’s often our most shared personal experience beyond the living of moment to moment; and my confusion saying all that, may be its most notable shared quality; what you’ve expressed Abigail, and how, is something I truly cherish 🙏

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  9. Pingback: The Burden of Honesty in Suffering – QuietMomentsWithGod

  11. Thank you for articulating this struggle so honestly and openly. People find it hard to hold space for suffering and pain, and often people want to rescue rather than just be there. When that’s communicated it feels like a shut down to the soul. My heart goes out to you. Hugs and love 😘

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