My first for-pay writing found me opining, at the tender age of fifteen, about the virtues of pain.

I suffered chronic pain before the phrase had been coined.  I did not know why, and I’m sure my parents didn’t either.  My sister Adrienne and I “walked funny”, and my legs hurt.  I imagine hers did also but we never discussed it.  Our family life held many realities more challenging than a child’s painful legs.  The other obstacles distracted my mother in ways that I find perfectly understandable in retrospect.

I wrote the Pain essay for the Christian Board of Publication’s youth magazine.  Adrienne served on the editorial board which probably gave me an advantage in the competition for selection.  They paid $15.00 per essay.  We could pick our topic.  I sold two pieces that summer — the one on pain and another titled, “God as An It”.  The fact that a Christian magazine published an article by a fifteen-year-old which suggested that God has no gender astonishes the writer’s adult self.  At the time, I did not understand the article’s potential controversy.

My theory about the virtues of pain seems less grand from this vantage point.  As had many before and since, I suggested that without pain, we cannot appreciate pleasure.  I did not mean “pleasure” in a sexual way but in a broader sense.  I wrote that times of sorrow, grief, and physical suffering contrasted with times of contentment and splendor to allow us to appreciate the latter.  Lows accentuate the highs; valleys allow us to observe the towering grandeur of the mountains.

Now, forty-five years later and nearly fifteen months after I stopped using prescription narcotics to dull my pain, I’ve come to that awareness once more.  Percoset and Vicodin did not really take my pain away, but they disconnected me from its rushing heat — although not always, and,  over time, not really.  But they did dull the sensations enough to distance me from any contrast.  The curtailment of pain also lulled me into forgetting how marvelous life can be.  I lived in a stupor.

When my system finally purged itself of the lingering numbness that had gripped me, I did feel the pain more keenly.  I felt lots of things more keenly to be quite honest:  Loss, grief, anger, sorrow.  All of this happened coincidental with my deciding to learn to live complaint-free and blog about it.  Other events crowded my life at the same time, events which don’t bear discussing here but which had the emotional effect of walking into a beam in the dark of your bedroom while stepping on Legos barefoot.  What great timing, eh?  Give up pain medication and complaining just as your life falls apart and you’ve really got something about which to whine!

A day will dawn in my personal journey when I see the irony of the perfect storm into which I sailed at the end of 2013.  That day lies ahead but here on this day, I can at least recall my first bit of profitable writing with a rueful smile.  “The Virtues of Pain” launched a short-lived career as a professional writer and lingers in the background as a harbinger of my middle-aged experiences.  I could not have known that I would prove my thesis but I take some satisfaction in having done so.

I will concede that my younger self had one thing right:  Without pain, we cannot truly appreciate pleasure.  Without loss, we do not hold as surely to that which remains.  Without darkness, we value less the light of a single steady candle.

And so it goes.  I’d rather live pain-free; but since I am human and therefore susceptible to trouble I cannot.  Therefore I resolve to embrace its lessons, and count myself the luckier for having learned them.  I will turn to that flickering candle, and allow myself to appreciate its brave resistance to the gathering gloom.