I have had a lot of Pain in my life: my parents’ divorce, my dad’s alcoholism, homelessness & alleged suicide, loss of my beloved grandpa & grandma, childlessness, immigration of some of my closest friends & brutal betrayal suddenly brought upon me by the other ones, business & job losses, compelled immigration, my stomach & back issues, my feelings of anxiety & the blues. Life was not easy for me, starting at age five when I first got into a hospital & counting & counting & counting.
Some may say my Pain is not painful enough compared to the Pain of others, and they may be right, but I learned that Pain could not be compared. A child feels Pain during several hours at a hospital as deeply as an adult during several years of her closest friend’s silent treatment. I can testify to that. We all live in Pain, and Pain changes all of us, for better or for worth or, as it usually turns out in my personal experience, for both.
Several years into our immigration, during the Covid pandemic, an English acronym came to my mind: all three words – Pain, Paint & Painting – start with PAIN, and the secret of turning Pain into Painting is hidden in the letter “T” which stands for “TRUST.” As simple as it sounds, it is deep enough to write a book about it & maybe one day I will because I have all the other parts of this acronym too, but as of now, I just want to focus on “TRUST” – the paint Tube in which I will carefully gather all my Pain to Paint my Painting.
