I didn't Need the Pain

It was my freshman year at ASU. I was in my very first English class of many, many English classes in college. Unfortunately, it was ENG 101: dumb people English. So I found the one person in that class that I trusted to edit my papers, and everyone knew that Gabe and I would edit any of their papers, and that we would let them edit our stuff, but that there probably wasn't much that they were going to be able to fix. (Yes, that sounds really snobby, but I was forced into the realization that I am an elitist, so I am now forcing everyone else to realize it too.)

One day, I was listening to Gabe discuss with our teacher (who actually wasn't a moron, thank Buddah) the idea of the memory of pain. He argued that there is no such thing as a memory of pain, only pain itself. He claimed that by remembering pain, you recreate the pain. Logic follows that if you are recreating the pain, it is no longer a memory, but something that is actually happening to you.

Apparently this idea has really stuck with me over the years, becuase it was the first thing I thought of when a friend of mine suggested a related, but opposing idea: we don't remember the pain we felt, but we remember being in pain. To relate an example: someone doesn't remember what it felt like when she burned her hand on the top coils of a heated oven, but she remembers that it hurt a lot.

Now, I don't know that I agree 100% with either of these ideas, I'm just throwing them out there to anyone who wants to ponder something that is probably fairly pointless, but interesting nonetheless.

I think that I favor the first idea more than the second. As I think about my friend burning her hand, my own hand is starting to shake and I can imaging the pain she must have felt, and that wasn't even my memory. More personally, as I think about slicing my finger open with a gobo, I can feel exactly where the scar on my little pinki finger is, without needing to look at it or feel it with my other hand.

Maybe the second idea is more appliciable to emotional pain, since that is what this friend and I were actually talking about. I, however, can't think of an emotional pain strong enough to be worth remembering that didn't also have physical manifestations, so I can't test this theory.

I don't know. This is just me sharing random thoughts with the world.

And, because I'm in a huge dance mood, I will leave you with the video that introduced me to the song that inspired my title for this post, which also happens to be my favorite dance from SYTYCD last season. : )


Totes.