The Purpose of Pain

Humans need everything to make sense. That’s why we humans turn to stories. A story makes sense of the mess of life and gives purpose to the pain we feel. We hope that the random pieces of our lives will come together and tell a greater story instead of being pointless.

This fills our stories with grave misrepresentations of the real world. Rape is depicted as a step towards self-realization and empowerment. Racism is viewed as garden-variety bullying that simply teaches that self-worth comes from within and not from others. Homophobia and transphobia are portrayed as added conflict to make standing up for yourself seem that much more empowering. But really, none of these things have the same effect in life as they do in our fictional depictions.

For the science-deniers that say that being trans is a choice, transitioning on any level is equivalent to the choice of receiving chemo when you have cancer, taking insulin when you have diabetes, or going to the emergency room when you have a heart attack. Transitioning might be a “choice,” but it is the choice to live when you want to die. It is faith and hope in a brighter and better future that is worth living for. 

I wouldn’t allow myself to even consider I was trans until I was twenty-six. Even then I refused to do anything about it, telling myself it wouldn’t change anything, because I didn’t want to be trans and I still felt that it was a sin. I overcame those concerns by acting in faith, and now my life is filled with greater joy and happiness. I have peace, I no longer wish I didn’t exist, and the incessant temptation to want to kill myself has greatly diminished. I’m in a good place, but I missed what everyone else had: an adolescence and young adulthood.

I lost my youth to gender dysphoria. Denying who I was (largely influenced by not knowing where to find the truth), I was unable to live as myself. I was a shell of a person going through the motions of a human being; but, lacking substance, it was as if I wasn’t a person. I went through those years but gained little of value from them.

I look around and see people with friends from their youth, their squad from college with whom they reflect on the fun and hard things they got through together. I look back and see people I was never able to bond with because of a severe mental illness. Everyone else grew roots while I was lost in a stormy sea. The sea may have calmed and I may have made it to the harbor, but I lack the community that brings stability. 

It’s impossible to determine what would have happened if I had been recommended therapy when my pediatrician noticed that I wore several too-small sports bras over my not even b-cup developing breasts, or that I was reluctant to have my body checked for puberty’s progress. What would it have been like to be a trans boy who came out in 2002? Would I have been able to survive the depression coupled with the discrimination? Would I have stuck with theater because it was my love instead of doing band because they needed me and I needed to be needed to stay alive? Would I have been brave enough to tell my parents that I didn’t want to go to BYU because I wanted to study architecture? Would I have even been allowed at BYU? Would I have met and married my husband, my greatest source of joy?

But questions of what might have been are pointless because they never will be. Instead I lived in a period of darkness where who I am as a person didn’t exist. I made bad decisions. I lied to myself and others. I developed an eating disorder which still impacts my relationship with food today. I made choices based on wanting to die but also not wanting to be a burden on others by killing myself. I had no real friends or connections because there is nothing to connect to if you are not yourself. It was a tornado that destroyed everything while I was building; a tsunami that took away everything I could have loved; it was pain and suffering that hasn’t made me a better person or made me stronger.

So, here I stand at twenty-nine, feeling that at least twenty of those years have been wasted and lost –The years that everyone else fused life-long friendships and happy memories while studying what they loved because at least they were whole even if they made mistakes by misunderstanding themselves. I am restarting my life with one root in a soil without the knowledge and experience that others at least developed during their formative years.

I mourn the loss of being able to perform while I would still look like the young and dashing protagonist of musicals. I mourn the friends that I had but was unable to hold onto. I mourn the academic choices I made when I tried to figure out what others wanted for me because I couldn’t find myself. I mourn being lost when so many people around me could have saved me. I mourn time that pulled me away from personal development at a time I should have been developing the most. A loss that served no purpose.

Admittedly, this is one of many reasons I hold to the religion of my youth. The belief that everything will be made right through the Atonement of Jesus Christ portrays the millenium as a time where we get to do the things robbed from us in mortality. At Church, we only talk about how mothers who lose babies at childbirth or near childbirth will still be able to raise them, but I imagine being resurrected in a form able to perform as Jason in Bare, Evan in Dear Evan Hansen, and Jack in Newsies (and many other roles, some not even written yet). Maybe it is an idle dream, but it gives me hope and peace. It helps me get past the what-might-have-beens.

My experience also pointed out the truth that not all losses and pain and suffering are for your well-being and personal growth and development. Being forced to stay in the dark with regular suicidal thoughts while being lost because I was kept from the truth that people called evil was not something that made me stronger. It was a waste of time and suffering. Falling sick because my father misgendered me was not a moment of growth and improvement for me. Facing discrimination does not work together for my good, much the same way that being thrown into the fire did not benefit the believers in Ammonihah. 

As Alma explained to Amulek why Gd would not give them the power to stop the slaughter of Amulek’s neighbors, friends, and likely even his wife and children: Gd allows bad things to happen so that bad or deceived people can be punished for their action or inaction. Suffering, pain, loss, disability, and hardship are not always things that work to the benefit of the one who suffers. Too often we judge those suffering as needing to suffer to become better people instead of realizing that their suffering is a testimony against those who cause it and those who do nothing to stop it. A testimony that will bring the judgment of Gd against us on Judgment Day. But these are simply the thoughts of a human being who is seeking meaning in his own life.