“Suffering well” is bullshit.

Free yourself from the expectation to be more than human.

I am not suffering strong. I am not overflowing with trust. I am not smiling through my sorrow. I am sad every single day. I fall asleep dreading having to wake up to my living nightmare, again.

For years, I’ve heard people ask, “How can I suffer well? How do you suffer well?”

Five years ago, writing This Too Shall Last, I might have told you about union with Christ. I would have waxed poetically and long about the strange communion we can have in suffering because of the God who chose embodiment to show us love.

Somewhere deep inside, I still believe those words. But those words are no longer forming a boat that can carry me through this choppy sea. Instead, they feel like the cries of bystanders on a beach, yelling out instructions to make it back to the dock, unaware that the sound of this storm drowns out every word.

I have never felt more humbled in my life. I went from being the healthiest I’ve ever been as an adult—living my largest career dreams, finally feeling free to experience ease in many layers of my life that once seemed impossible—to nearly losing my life, depending on others to help me shower and stand, and progressively getting sicker with each passing month.

No amount of lived experience or practice as a trauma therapist could save me from being traumatized by my own life. No amount of prior therapy to “release” trauma could save me from nearly dying. No nervous system regulation resource can abate the agony of living in a body with tissues rapidly dying inside.¹

I couldn’t save myself from getting sick, and you can’t either.

The trauma therapist influencers on Instagram have simplified all pain and illness in our lives to the service they are selling. Just release your trauma, and you will be well! Still sick? You probably haven’t expressed your repressed emotions enough. Bloated? Sleepless? Fatigued? You can heal your nervous system in just thirty days if you buy this skinny white lady’s $89 somatic course!

When I scroll through Instagram, I see privileged people grasping for power through selling you the solution…to being human.

Is there room for relief in somatic therapy? Obviously. I wouldn’t be a somatic-oriented therapist if I didn’t see its efficacy. Is there room for more health through better nutrition? Duh. But don’t for one second let shiny salespeople backhand shame you for still being sick.

Capitalism doesn’t hold the cure to your pain.

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If capitalism-cloaked-in-care can’t cure or carry us, what does?

The other day my jaw dropped when I came across this quote from palliative care physician Ira Byock:

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones. But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said. “We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.”²

Yesterday

Maggie Smith

shared some writing prompts, one of which made me cry. “Your femur is stronger than concrete,” she wrote, “and it’s hollow.” It was just a bullet point, a passing suggestion of a fact to follow into a poem. But for me, it was like an MRI scan, lighting up what feels so broken in my soul.

Large parts of my femurs are dying. (You can read more about Avascular Necrosis and what’s happening with my health in my last substack.) The strongest bones in my body are suffocating.

What happens to a soul when the strongest part of your body is dying?

It feels unsurvivable.

And without others, it is.

I can’t unbreak the mini fractures in my femurs with a little more faith. I can’t restore blood flow to the ends of my bones with somatic stretches. I can’t survive without someone staying with me long enough to guide the boat of my body into safety.

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I am not suffering well. I am not a living well of gratitude for the gift of being alive. I am angry, and most days, I feel some measure of hopelessness.

Theological facts aren’t finding their way into the fierce storm I am traveling through. Truths that used to wrap around me like warm blankets now feel waterlogged. My old ways of making it through challenging seasons of sickness no longer are working quite so well.

But I am not in the boat, braving all of this brokenness, alone.

I don’t feel God’s nearness right now, but I feel my husband’s hand stroking my tear-soaked hair out of my eyes. I don’t see a way out of this storm, but Ryan and my surgeons and specialists are navigating us to safety. I don’t feel like a good friend or writer or even person, but I am finding goodness in every gesture of my belonging and belovedness—in meals delivered, venmo gifts sent, and kind old people in the therapy pool who show me how to move in ways that hurt less. I don’t feel like the strong, hopeful woman I prefer being, but I am still seen as me by the person closest to me. I don’t have to suffer well to be loved.

When the strongest part of you suffocates, I hope you’ll let your heart break. When your health humbles you harder than you knew was possible, I hope you’ll have the audacity to bless your own humanity as holy rather than humiliating. When you feel internal pressure to suffer well or suffer strong, I hope you’ll let your storms strip away every last belief in self-sufficiency as the storyline of success. I hope you’ll let someone carry you home.

—KJ

PS Thanks for bearing with my absence here. I am still so nauseated and in such extreme pain every single day, that it is very difficult to be able to write. I’ll be having surgery on both of my knees Feb 22nd, and after that I’ll be safe to begin treating my other out-of-control diseases too. For now, I’m just trying to make it to surgery without too many panic attacks etc. I so hope to be able to write more here in the coming months, especially for paid subscribers of Embodied. I want to write for you so badly! But we’ll see how I keep coming through the storm… With that said, if you are frustrated by not getting your money’s worth with your subscription here, I will be 0% offended if you cancel or pause your subscription. I know many of you have said you’re subscribing as a small way you can support me, and I’m trying to receive that. But it’s also more than okay if you need to pause until I’m more functional.

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1. Read my previous substack to better understand what I’m referring to here. I’m not “dying,” but I am very sick, with large parts of bones dying due to treatments that kept me alive last summer.

2. Accessed via the Aspen Institute, emphasis added. https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Byock_The-Best-Care-Possible.pdf