It’s strange how people react to pain. Not the quiet kind that lingers in the mind, nor the kind that settles in the heart like a dull ache. No, they react to the kind they can see, the kind that bleeds, bruises, and scars.

Post a picture of a wound, and the reactions flood in. A mix of shock, sympathy, maybe even admiration. People pause long enough to say, “That must have hurt,” or “Stay strong.” Some might even admire the resilience behind the scars, romanticizing survival as if it were a choice, as if pain were poetry instead of something you never wanted in the first place.

But try to explain the wound, the battle behind it, the nights spent fighting the pain, the quiet moments of breaking, the struggle to keep breathing, and suddenly, it’s too much. Post the story behind the battle, the rawness of what it took to survive, and no one will dare to read. No one will share the weight of your pain. The likes slow down. The comments fade. People disengage.

Because truthfully, people don’t want to carry someone else’s pain. most don’t want to know what it took to survive. They don’t want to feel the weight of someone else’s suffering.  They don’t want to feel the weight of knowing what you had to endure. They don’t want to sit with the discomfort of understanding. They prefer pain in its simplest, most digestible form, something they can acknowledge with a quick reaction before scrolling past, returning to their own curated realities.

But wounds aren’t just for display. They have stories beneath them, battles fought and lost, moments of breaking and healing. And maybe that’s the real tragedy, not that people ignore the depth of suffering, but that they prove, over and over again, that they don’t really want to know.

Because knowing means caring, and caring means carrying even a sliver of that weight. And understanding means effort. It means pausing long enough to feel. And most people? They’d rather not. They’d rather glance at the wound, react to the blood, and move on before it gets too heavy.

And that’s okay. Because I don’t want to be asked either way. Some stories are too heavy to tell, and some pains are too deep to explain. So, let them look. Let them react. Let them move on.

And to most people? They’d rather just look and move on.

And soon, I will, too.

Love,

Ana 💋