No Pain, No Gain?

I remember as a little girl thinking my grandmother was the most loving and craziest person I knew. Nobody loved me better in my opinion, however she would say some really disturbing things. Before I had even stepped foot into a school, she had told me two things that had me very worried: 1. "Life is extremely hard." 2. "It only gets harder as you get older." I believed her, yet I think that's why I was also so quick to give up or get so suicidally depressed. It's not that she was serving me a deception, and I know her intentions were to prepare me for the challenges ahead, but perhaps that pep talk would have been better served at a later time.

My family (the one I was raised with up to 2012) was Catholic. I still consider myself Catholic, but unless you're Catholic you just can't understand how painful the life is whether you're a masochist or not. If you're a masochist and not some Catholic munk or nun, then the shrinks will consider you mentally disturbed or psychotic. Cutters, burners, and the like are usually "baker acted" for their own protection. If you're a munk or a nun at a Catholic monastery, the painful acts are considered "normal". So do you agree with that old phrase, "No pain, no gain?"

That phrase must have been a slogan or something like the Nike ad campaign "Just Do It" which was very popular especially for someone like me who thought stage divers were insane. Sports mentalists, athletes, and coaches are very fond of those two phrases because it takes more than discipline to become "great" at a certain sport. I'm pretty certain that if you interviewed any athletic star, you could dig up stories of the pain costs they paid to become the star they became.

Yet their payments in pain were of the physical sort. The other pains (the ones the shrinks tend to deal with) are of the mental and emotional kind. Those are not seen by the "normal" eye. Some people don't believe in "pyschosomatic" issues, or they won't acknowledge unseen pain simply because without physical proof, any deceiver complaints could receive the same beneficial response. I think that is a tragic viewpoint and hurts much more than it helps. My analogy is this: If a thief robs a store, that doesn't necessarily mean that no valid shoppers will return to the store. So if a faker cries about pain that isn't real and if you treat them as if the pain is real, nothing is lost. But ignoring real pain (even if you can't see it or feel it) is like blowing up the store because someone stole a candy bar.

I'm not sure if I believe in "Just Do It" or "No pain, no gain" anymore. I can understand how those phrases are useful in Sports thinking, but for someone past the age of 50, I don't think those phrases apply. People over the age of 50 have different phrases that make more sense. Phrases like "Why should I?" and "What's the point?" and "The pain is real."

Maybe some of us old timers were not Superstars in sports, but we have our own pain stories. Some people may have suffered more or less than others and only God knows what the correct measures are. I suppose that would be a good question to ask God (from any Jew or Christian).... "Hey God, did you believe in the phrase 'no pain, no gain' or was that from the other guy?" If it did come from God, I wonder if I had trouble seeing the gains.