🌸 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.

Darkness Looks Different From the Outside

Imagine two people standing in the same dark room.

One is observing it. The other has lived there for years.

The observer might notice the shape of the room. The texture of the walls. The small amount of light coming through a crack somewhere above them. They might recognize something poetic about the contrast.

The person who lives there may not care about any of that. They may simply want a way out. That distinction matters.

We can look at addiction and see resilience. Someone living through addiction may see shame.

We can look at grief and see love. Someone grieving may feel only absence.

We can look at someone’s broken relationship and see a powerful story. The person inside that relationship may simply be trying to understand how their life became what it is.

The observer and the subject can occupy the same moment while experiencing entirely different realities.

And perhaps that is one of the strange powers and dangers of storytelling.

A writer can take something chaotic and give it shape. A writer can take something painful and give it language. A writer can take something ugly and make it beautiful. But the beauty created on the page does not retroactively make the experience beautiful for the person who lived it.

We Are Drawn to What We Would Rather Avoid

I don’t think our fascination with darkness is necessarily malicious.

In many cases, it comes from curiosity.

We want to understand people. We want to know why someone makes a decision we would never make. Why someone stays when we would leave. Why someone returns to something that has already hurt them. Why someone continues repeating a pattern even after recognizing that the pattern is destroying them.

Darkness contains questions. And questions make compelling stories.

There is something concentrated about human suffering. It strips away ordinary distractions. People reveal themselves differently when something important is at stake.

That can make painful experiences extraordinarily compelling to write about.

But compelling does not mean ours.

A person’s pain does not become public property simply because it contains a good story.

Their worst moment does not automatically belong to the person capable of describing it most beautifully. And perhaps most importantly, being able to understand someone’s suffering is not the same as having permission to use it.

The Problem With Turning People Into Stories

Writers are constantly told to look for stories.

Look closer.

Listen carefully.

Notice what other people overlook. Pay attention to contradictions, find the unusual person in the ordinary room.

These are useful instincts. They are also dangerous ones when we forget that the people around us are not characters waiting to be discovered. Real people do not exist for narrative structure.

They do not have to provide satisfying arcs.

They do not owe us symbolism. They do not have to become lessons.

They can be contradictory and they can relapse. They can make the same mistake repeatedly. They can change their minds. They can fail to become the person we hoped they would become. And they can remain unfinished.

Fiction gives us the privilege of deciding what a character means.

Life does not.

That difference is easy to forget when you’re a writer. A person tells you something painful, and your mind begins organizing it.

This belongs here. That explains this.

That moment connects to this one.

Suddenly a life that was messy and unresolved begins looking like a plot. There is an undeniable beauty in that transformation. There is also something unsettling about it. Because the writer gets resolution even when the person does not.

Beauty Does Not Make the Darkness Disappear

This is the idea at the center of my novel, Beauty Where The Sun Doesn’t Shine.

The title comes from a simple belief: that even in the darkest places, there can be something meaningful, human, strange, complicated, or beautiful.

But the novel is also interested in the uncomfortable question underneath that belief.

What happens when the person searching for that beauty is not the person living in the darkness?

The story follows Dallas Teller, a college writer given an assignment that demands more than research. She wants to find something real. Something raw. Something that cannot be recreated by sitting behind a desk and reading about other people’s experiences.

She becomes fascinated by addiction and the people living inside it.

Not because addiction is simple. Because it isn’t.

There are contradictions everywhere. People can want to change and still repeat themselves. They can love someone and still hurt them. They can recognize their own patterns and remain trapped inside them.

They can be funny, intelligent, kind, selfish, generous, destructive, frightened, hopeful, and deeply complicated all at once.

In other words, they can be human.

And humanity is often where the most compelling stories are found.

But there is a difference between witnessing someone’s humanity and deciding that their humanity belongs to your story. That distinction becomes increasingly difficult for Dallas to recognize.

I wanted to explore that difficulty without making the answer comfortable.

Because storytelling itself is not innocent simply because the story is meaningful.

The Person in the Darkness Still Has to Live There

This may be the part of the idea that matters most to me.

We often talk about suffering as though its value is determined by what eventually comes from it. A difficult experience becomes worthwhile because it taught someone something.

A loss becomes meaningful because it inspired art. A terrible period becomes beautiful because someone emerged stronger.

Sometimes that is true.

But sometimes the person is still in the middle of it.

Sometimes there is no lesson yet, sometimes there is no beautiful ending and sometimes someone is simply hurting.
And I think we should be careful about demanding meaning from people who are still trying to survive their own experiences.

The audience may find beauty.
The writer may find beauty.
The reader may find beauty.

But that does not mean the person suffering has to. They are allowed to call the darkness dark.

Who Gets to Decide What a Life Means?

This is where storytelling becomes especially complicated.

If someone tells me their story, I may understand something about them that I did not understand before.

But understanding is not ownership.

If I can turn their experience into something beautiful, that does not automatically make the experience mine.

And if I create something powerful from their suffering, I should at least be willing to ask what I gained from it and what they lost.

That question is uncomfortable because it does not have a universal answer. Art has always transformed pain.

People have always created from grief, oppression, heartbreak, illness, addiction, failure, injustice, and loss.

Some of the most meaningful works we have come from experiences no one would wish upon another person.

I don’t think the answer is to stop creating.

I think the answer is to remain aware of the distance between the story and the person who had to live it.

Because sometimes that distance is enormous.

Why I Wrote This Story

Beauty Where The Sun Doesn’t Shine is fiction, but the question behind it is one I find very real.

As writers, we are constantly looking at the world and asking what is worth writing about.

What makes a person interesting?

What makes a story matter?

Where is the beauty?

Where is the tragedy?

Where is the contradiction?

But perhaps there is another question we should ask.

What does the person inside the story experience while we are admiring it?

That question does not destroy storytelling. If anything, I think it makes storytelling more honest.

There is beauty in darkness. I believe that.

There is meaning in painful experiences. I believe that too.

But beauty does not erase suffering. Meaning does not erase harm. And a beautiful story does not necessarily mean a beautiful experience. Sometimes the darkness is still darkness.

Sometimes the person living inside it never gets to see the beauty everyone else found there. And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable truth of all.

We can find beauty in the dark and we can write about it. We can understand it. We can even be changed by it. But we should never forget that somewhere inside that darkness, there may still be a person trying to find the light.

Beauty Where The Sun Doesn’t Shine is my exploration of that space , the space between observation and participation, between understanding and exploitation, between the story we see and the life someone else has to live.

Because beauty does not make the darkness disappear.

Sometimes it only teaches us how to look at it.

Beauty Where The Sun Doesn't Shine

Makitia Thompson
Minds In Design

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