The Relativity of Pain and Challenges

Sometimes, the world likes to test our resilience. Yesterday, everything was perfect; today, nothing goes right. Difficult moments arrive like that, without knocking. Big or small, we all know them. There’s no need to make rankings or comparisons: everyone has their own battle, and every battle leaves its mark.

I have been through my share. Illnesses that threatened to stop everything. Moments when I could no longer see a reason, a purpose. But I understood one thing: the measure of pain is relative; it changes for each person. It doesn’t matter how great the tragedy, but how we perceive it.

Those moments are not the end. They can be a new beginning. But merely wanting it isn’t enough; in fact, perhaps it’s useless. This is the hardest lesson: it’s not about fighting always, at all costs. You have to know how to surrender. Lay down your arms. Shed that armor made of years of patterns and recurring thoughts. To stand naked, only then can you truly choose how to dress yourself.

Every challenge is unique

Pain isn’t measured; it’s lived. There’s no universal scale that can indicate how much one wound is worth compared to another. It’s all relative.

As Leo Tolstoy said:

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Each of us has our own way of experiencing pain, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we cannot compare ourselves to anyone. Everyone has their own story, and however small it may seem, for the person living it, it is everything.

When I was diagnosed with lymphoma, the idea of challenge transformed. Reality narrowed to a single word, a path I hadn’t chosen. The illness was like another world, with its own rules, its own language. I suddenly found myself confronting fragility, with no possibility of escape. Time began to be measured in chemotherapy appointments, like stages of a journey that seemed endless. Each session brought a burden of fatigue, anticipation, and hope. I found myself measuring life in terms of numbers and percentages, as if it had become a matter of probability and resistance. It was a calculation I had never learned but had to face.

Then, after getting through that battle, I thought I could finally catch my breath. But it wasn’t over. Almost without giving me time to get back on my feet, autoimmune encephalitis arrived. And this time, reality itself shattered. The lymphoma had attacked the body, but the encephalitis struck my mind. A whole month of hospitalization, a month in which I wasn’t myself, in which my perception of myself, others, and the world was altered. The days were made of white walls, of unknown faces I couldn’t connect to anything real. Hallucinations, thoughts that blurred in a sea of fog. I was suspended between two worlds, one real and one built by my own mind. The fear of losing control, of never finding meaning again, mixed with a sense of complete abandonment.

There’s no way to compare pain

And as I tried to make sense of all this, a lesson began to emerge: there’s no way to compare pain; there’s no measure.

As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Human suffering is absolutely human and relative, like a gas which fills a chamber, no matter whether the chamber be large or small.”

Each person has their own space of suffering, and each fills it in their own way. And my chamber had filled twice in an incredibly short time, forcing me to rethink the very concept of resilience.

I realized that every difficulty, though unique, fits into a larger, universal pattern. Alan Watts described life as a play of shadows, where every event has meaning only in relation to how we perceive it. And perhaps that’s exactly right. Looking back, I wonder if these illnesses had a meaning, or if they simply happened, like a passing shadow.

In those hospital days, between therapy and hallucinations, I began to glimpse a simple truth: you can’t always fight. There are times when you have to lay down your arms, let go. It’s not a sign of weakness, but a way to adapt, to accept, and to try to understand. When everything seems to crumble, perhaps the only way is to stop, to be silent. The pain remains, of course, but in that silence, you find space to begin again.