🌸 Who Gets to Call Suffering Beautiful?
There is a strange thing we do with darkness. We enter it willingly when it belongs to someone else. We read memoirs about addiction. We watch documentaries about broken families. We listen to people describe the worst periods of their lives. We read novels about grief, obsession, abuse, loneliness, compulsion, betrayal, and loss. And when those stories are told well, we often call them beautiful. There is nothing inherently wrong with finding meaning in painful experiences. Stories can help us understand what we have never experienced ourselves. They can make unfamiliar lives recognizable. They can give language to things people have struggled to explain. But I have always been interested in the uncomfortable space between finding beauty in suffering and benefiting from someone else’s suffering . Because those are not necessarily the same thing.