Ouch.

((Wisdom teeth extraction.))

Pain is a strange sensation, almost as strange as empathy. I usually find it hard to feel others' pain, but mine seems to be currently overtaking me. Typical Leo, always exaggerating and being self-centered. I read an essay by Helene Foley during my third year in Cambridge. I can't remember its exact title, but it was regarding the pain of others and the difficulty of describing your own pain to someone else, and understanding someone else's pain. She listed a number of adjectives commonly used to identify the causes of pain in medical contexts - piercing, throbbing, burning. The problem with these is subjectivity. If we are all individual beings that experience the world differently, surely we will experience emotions and sensations of the same thing differently as well? Even if that means tasting the same dish in a different manner from our partner at the dinner table. Of course, taste comes into play here as well, but what I am trying to say is the fact that things are relative and emotions are not tangible entities that we can easily pinpoint and share with others.

At the end of the day, no one can describe or feel your own pain but yourself. And this is not just physical pain I'm talking about. Emotional pain can be the hardest to heal and the one that lasts the longest. There are no chemicals to heal it, no specific timespan it should take place in, no particular point in time where it should simply stop and disappear. It could linger there, it could come and go, it could be with you forever and overshadow other less powerful emotions. How do you describe that to someone else? Doesn't everyone's pain feel much stronger to their own selves than to others? Is this feeling of unique isolation and sense of individuality an ironic reminder that deep inside we are all the same and think the same?

The good thing about pain is that it reminds you you're human, and it tells you to be grateful you have someone to look after you. The day you wake up and you don't feel pain is the day your life feels a little bit better. Nonetheless, this still doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to deal with it and just let it fade on its own.

Take me, for example. I've taken about 2 grams of painkillers since midday.