The pain we perform
Like every woman I know right now, I am tired. Exhausted.
I am tired of living in a world containing a level of cruelty that still manages to be shocking.
I’m tired of women - especially Black women - being tasked with taking trauma, editing it into a neat package, and performing it in just the right way; for clicks, to beg for a scrap of compassion, to prove to people that there’s a problem.
I’m tired of this world where people abuse, harass, and lie about a woman of colour until she is suicidal, then until she feels she has to say something on television, and then these same people accuse her of making it all up.
Why? Is she not visibly sad enough for you? Is exposing your pain and vulnerability publicly, for everyone, not enough to be believed?
We still don’t have the language to convey pain.
There are pain scales, comparisons, judgments of facial expression, but truly understanding someone’s pain is a slippery, ungraspable thing. To even be believed is a struggle, especially when you’re up against bias that casts your pain as lesser.
We’re asked to perform pain, assured that this will help us heal.
Back in the early days of the internet, women writers had to expose their most recent wounds in personal essays.
There’s endless art in exorcising demons by getting them out on to a page, or the stage, or a canvas.
There are long, emotive Instagram captions, stories told in screenshots of the notes app, photos taken of tears cutting tracks through foundation, video confessions of nights spent awake.
There’s protest; collective expression of pain and demand for change.
If you feel your pain privately, did it really happen? If we can’t see it, can we believe it?
There’s a problem in this rhetoric: the idea that expressing pain in the right way will help people understand. The problem is that there is no right way.
You won’t be believed. You didn’t perform it quite right. There was something off.
Actually, you did it too well. It was over the top. You’re playing the victim.
Your pain is too angry, too aggressive, it’s making a mess, you’re not being appropriate.
The problem is that pain isn’t visible, and when it’s made visible, it’s ugly. It hurts to look it in the face. There is no right way to perform pain, but we still have to do it, get it wrong, and get shamed for trying, for even feeling pain in the first place.
There’s no neat conclusion to this, no takeaway. Patterns of pain continue, and the best thing we can do is bear witness.